Ruba Abughaida
IN OUR SKY, A STAR
On the walls of the city
occupation sketches a door
made of tears and blood
for a storm to blow through.
My grandmother Nijmeh watched over
their photos, while the armies spread out
letting the memories rest and live –
protect the house in Haifa.
She offers herself to my poems,
we are closer
as I dwell in all that is unknown,
grasp at a constellation of her memories.
We were wounded so early,
carried by the dust
across borders into re-built lives
held together by a compass
pointing towards Palestine.
We belong to a country without an age,
chase away isolation, violet-blue as the sea,
green as the tiled fountains of Damascus
where she would wait, longing for home.
Author’s Note: Nijmeh, Arabic word meaning ‘star’ and the name of my paternal grandmother.
FOR JERUSALEM
In Jerusalem, cobblestones are made of wild sunflowers
and the road to the great dome is lined with golden threads
holding prayers and blessings, covered in silk dawns
blowing the day into our open arms.
We are surprised by our pain at being there,
hang onto a longing to rename the streets,
the alleyways and all the neighbourhoods;
return them to their original Arabic.
Gathering around the Palestinian quarter with its stalls
we lean on a plate of food drenched in olive oil,
carrying Jerusalem on our backs.
A POEM FOR THE SOUTH
We burn lamps for the ghosts
lighting a cavernous past that covers wounds,
we raise them on our shoulders along the towns
of the South moving along Jezzin, Hasbayah, Marjayoun,
Nabatiyeh, Sur, Mleeta, Bint Jbeil – ornaments of resistance
like a string of lights setting fires to occupation.
When heartache stamped its prints on us
we practiced how to keep it close
until it becomes an illusion,
emptying itself onto the traces of the towns
filled with crowded streets
and homes that have wed,
given birth
in the echo of martyred time
honoring the names of those
that no longer have shadows,
liberating us to resist.
Ruba Abughaida is a Palestinian-Lebanese poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of The Forgotten Queens, a book of poetry in Arabic (Bissan Publishing July 2024) and the poetry pamphlet Paths and Passageways in English and Arabic (Albion Beatnik Press 2018). She won the Writers and Artists Historical Fiction Award (2014) for her short story “The Sirocco Winds.” Her work has appeared in several publications across Lebanon, the UK, Europe, and the US.