My Nakba Birthday

Your unkindness re-wrote my autobiography
Punchlines in guts
Blades for tongues
And a mouth pregnant with
Thunder

Your unkindness told me to push
Through

Look
Listen

I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba
To a mother that reaped olives
And figs
And other Qur'anic verses
Wattine wal zaytoun
My name: a bomb in a white room
A walking suspicion
In an airport
Choiceless politics

I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba
Outside the hospital room
Protests, textured with burnt rubber
Kuffiyah'ed faces and bare bodies
Stones thrown onto tanks
Tanks imprinted with US flags
Lands
Smelling of tear gas, skies tiled with
Rubber-coated bullets
A few bodies shot, dead, died
Numbers in a headline
I and
My sister
Born
Birth lasts longer than death
In Palestine, death is sudden
Instant
Constant
Happens in-between breaths

I was born amongst poetry
On the 50th anniversary
The liberation chants outside the hospital room
Told my mother
To push