In 2014, I went on a peace delegation to Palestine where I witnessed the choke-hold of military occupation, and it fundamentally changed how I looked at my privilege--it was no longer just a concept I acknowledged, it was an injustice that I was complicit in if I didn't act. Real human lives were at stake. When I returned in the fall, the killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice populated the news. Palestine and Black Lives Matter were not separate issues to me: the soldiers, the militarization of our police force, the fear that turns into murderous injustice, the racism, the colonialism--these things were all connected. This poem was my attempt to reconcile these realizations, and my writing is one of the small ways in which I resist.
I used to believe
it took so much to kill
without a bullet. I didn’t know
the hollowness of bodies,
how hands can lunge
and it can all collapse
like matter. Like nothing
matters. On TV,
a black man chokes.
A Palestinian man chokes.
No guns, no bombs. The body
caves in on itself:
the color of Dead Sea mud
licking the palms of my hands.
The reflection of our shadows
against tanks doesn’t reveal
the ways we perspire
or cry. But I see myself
in the little girl whose
bike careens into barbed wire,
and, still, she laughs. Once,
I was young like her too.
I didn’t know what people
could do to one another.
Once, I didn’t know my own worth,
and tried to snuff my body out,
let the pain slide
from my side until I was smoke,
choking the panicked bodies of those
that loved me. I used to think
this was hard. On TV,
a man walks down his street
peddling homemade cigarettes,
the police wrap his neck in the crook of an elbow,
and he can’t breathe, they can’t
breathe, I can’t breathe—
the breath leaves and I hear
its truth, but how can I live with it?
The man, the police officers,
he belongs, they belong,
we belong to us.
</em>){kind=link}