73. Rifqa | Mohammed El-Kurd
the arabic meaning of rifqa is: a person of gentle and kind personality
“Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa — she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resistance.”
This special book of poems was gifted to me recently by a dear Palestinian friend. I knew of Mohammed as I’d watched his speech at the Palestine Festival of Literature, so I was delighted to find out that he’d published his first poetry collection.
Born in Jerusalem, occupied Palestine, Mohammed, and his twin sister Muna lived through part of their family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah1 being seized by Israeli settlers. This powerful collection explores the emotional impact of living under Israeli occupation in Palestine.
With a thoughtful introduction by the poet aja monet who visited Rifqa and Mohammed in their Jerusalem home in 2015, she writes “no-one could have prepared me for what I saw with my own eyes and felt with my own heart. You cannot unseen once you have seen. I thought I was a poet before, but Palestine uprooted any sense of who I thought I was. I saw the audacity of evil and how it can be rationalised.”
Here are two poems from the collection that left a lasting impression on me.
Wednesday
There’s death in the eyes of this newborn.
I heard the baby complain about a treacherous defeat, called it the same old catastrophe.
A storm in his ear says it’s raging for silence.
Thunder erupts when he’s shushed.
What a worsened scenario. He skipped ahead.
What do you do when your destiny is predetermined?
Life in this hospital laughs at us. Long is the wait. Wild is the wind.
I ask if there’s a wedding going on.
The nurse complained of the clouds.
If I were a stupid flower, I’d wither under the rain.
They asked her, What’s wrong with the flower?
not What’s wrong with the rain?
Portrait of My Nose
Arrogant with height.
One nose away from clouds.
I have my grandmother’s
and in the knot, tangled
a homesickness
for people generous with
nose.
My grandmother’s is beautiful; mine is
one nose away from beauty,
one away from Anglo-Saxon.
I have my grandmother’s
and my grandmother had pride
favored functionality
she was never a
nose away from anything
but jasmines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Jarrah