DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.

Noor Hindi

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642597233
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

What is political poetry? How does history become lived experience? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? Noor Hindi's poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency. This collection is ultimately a provocation?on trauma, on art, on what it takes to change the world.

I.

Self-Interrogation

At the airport terminal, a woman is crying.
Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me, I—
Need to focus. On something besides.
The rush of migration. Lights so loud.
The unending sound. Of a newscaster’s voice.
Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Mother. Please, forgive
me. I want to call in dead. Last week,
there was a child in a yellow dress reading a poem.
For minutes on end, I could not be indifferent
to anything. Not the grass, dying yellow.
Not the bombs, twisting limbs.
Not the cages. Not the—Yes. There is a woman crying
at terminal six. Yes, I use a newspaper
to cover my eyes. Yes, I think of the child.
The tiny silver heart she placed in my palm.
How I threw it in the trash, seconds later.
But I promise. I promise. I promise. I—
meant it as an act of survival. Maybe love.

Thirst

Amman was a broken

railing I tried to lean on

and the Athan was a song

I tried and tried to love. That summer,

I was little and terrified

of God, my lust hanging

from the roots of my hair.

What did I know of the thirst

that moved at the speed

of fingers exploring a body

I wanted to be mine? I remember

my grandmother

tapping her feet during iftar, say al-Hamdillah,

say I am thankful

for this sunlight, this sorrow,

this summer, which is endless

and tastes like heat. After iftar,

I would hold her hand, let her guide

me to the women’s mosque,

where dirt lined

the soles of their feet;

their hands clutched prayer beads,

eyes with us and not. I longed

for the softness and surrender

that I mistook for faith.

Oh Allah, I never found you

in those spaces. Oh Allah,

it’s true: I turned selfish. Years later

and wanted to fuck

her—drank to drink

and get drunk until I was brave

and no longer a girl

wiping my teeth

with pages of the Quran.

When morning came, one of us

spent hours washing

her hands in an ocean of bleach,

the other stumbled into a mosque

for the first time in years

and howled at Allah for creating

appetites and tongues, for lungs

that inhale so much of this world.

In Which the White Woman on My Thesis Defense Asks Me about Witness

1.And what does it mean to witness yourself, on television, dying?

a.I no longer watch the news.

b.I’ve exhausted every mirror in my home searching for my eyes.

c.I mean to talk about the intersection between a knife and the flip side of a mirror.

2.Might we define this as a collective trauma?

a.Whose trauma?

b.A gathering of bodies might be called a circus to some // and a graveyard to others.

c.I cannot exactly describe what “this” is. // My mind sharpens // to salted lemons.

3.When you speak to your father about the politics surrounding witness, does he move beyond geography?

a.I never cared for maps.

b.My mother used to warn me: “God is watching. Your grandfather is watching. Your father is watching.” Their eyeballs // a static screen // shut off // off // off // I scream.

c.Whose geography?

4.Tell us about spectacle.

a.You pleasure that which makes us fiction // while staring // into our graved eyes.

b.My mother walking through Macy’s.

c.The intuitive desire to laugh at racist jokes is what my body might recognize as survival.

5.Do you believe in America?

a.Believe is sister to memory, and to love, and to cheer, and to trust. There are drones outside the doors of America. Who will catch them?

b.Who is the audience for this question?

c.Before burial, the hearse brought my grandfather’s body to our home in Akron, Ohio. Through a window, I watched the hearse take two laps around our block, then followed its license plate to disappearance.

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

I Once Looked in a Mirror but Couldn’t See My Body

after Ghassan Kanafani

I document as argument;
I exist. I learn this from watching my father

alone in the night
drawing and redrawing
a map
of Palestine, green ink.

Before 1947, he would insist,
before partition, before the nation became history,

before my tongue mistook thank you for survival,

before I chose an industry that headlines
my people dead.

A camera melts in the desert sun.
From far away, I hear the dying clicks of its shutter, the loud bang of
headlines slamming
newspapers, the sharp gaze of eyeballs.

Standing before my father, my own pupils gaping
at his calloused hands, I too wish to capture this moment,

hold it. Say, yes, this violence is possible, and also, there is pleasure in looking.

But who i...