Poetry in motion

Sharing and healing my heart in a room full of SWANA kin

On Saturday, I performed in a ME/SWANA poetry reading at Elliott Bay Books. About an hour before the event started, we got word that the US bombed Iran directly. To know that I was about to be in a room with SWANA community sharing my heart felt like surreal timing—and it ended up being just the medicine I needed.

Persian hands and wrists 
were made for nights like this
for shab-e shehr
for dard-o del
hands reached out
to grab a nut
a dried something or another
a cucumber 
a glass of tea 
poured for you by someone sweet 
sugar with your medicine
	the answer to this predicament we’re in
be with each other
and please remember 
who we are 
who we’ve been
poetry in motion

Poem 1

I have spent a lot of this season thinking about Gaza and why it feels as if we have remained so unmoved by the genocide, despite watching it all unfold in HD on our phones. Why we haven’t been seeing the same collective energy and action from 2020 when the people mobilized in support of Black lives.

USraeli propaganda and anti-Arab/Muslim racism aside, what I arrived at was the difference in time and space. Five years ago, so much of our day-to-day lives was stripped down to just the essentials. We had the time to sit with, read, internalize, and digest all the truth that was coming at us. We were craving connecting and yearned to be together in the streets. But “normal” life returned and crowded all the space we had opened in our hearts. The capitalist systems resumed their efforts to sever us from each other and from our selves.

On Saturday night, an audience member asked about how we can get people to take action and make a change. I think one of the most important things we can do for our world is to divest from the systems and structures that rob us of our time to be with what is—to let the pain of the truth wash over us and purify our minds, hearts, and bodies—so that we may come back to each other and our humanity.

Poem 2

For much of this season, the grief was so heavy that the words weren’t flowing—a shared experience for many artists, I learned Saturday night. So, my practice became to lean into these wordless moments, to rest into their embrace, and to find the grace of silence.

Poem 3

When my ego runs amuck with grief, it wants to control everything. Shake people awake—why can’t they see?! I lose all of my patience and most of my grace and I don’t always allow myself to feel this way. But recently I’ve been learning to play with the intensity, the heat of this grieving. So, this last one gets a little spicy as I integrate the screaming.