Sunday, September 28th, 2025 (Mid-afternoon, at a café about an hour’s walk from home)
The last thing I did before I left the apartment today was to hand-copy a poem I read for the first time about a week ago. That was the day a friend of mine was fasting in solidarity with the people of Palestine and the day I felt bereft of words to meet the occasion. The poem is “If I Must Die,” written by Rafaat Alareer. The second line of this poem – “You must live” – is the title of the collection of new poetry from Palestine that I purchased shortly after my latest return to the city. I have with me a few notes I made last week upon reading the poem.
The speaker of the poem (the “I”) says that if he must die, the poem’s listener (the “You”) must live to fashion what sounds like a peace flag in the form of a kite so that a child (possibly the speaker’s child) might someday gaze skyward and see this as a symbol of hope and, perhaps, a means of transcending the horrors of the present (or near-future) in Gaza. Last week, I noted the three people implied in the poem: the speaker, the child, and the listener, with the fates of both child and speaker being tenuous (or “up in the air”) and perhaps the greatest weight (of responsibility) being in the hands of the reader/listener – The “you” here was me, bereft of words, tasked merely with bearing witness to this world (hope, horrors, & all) and passing on the essence of this poem, which seems to be the essence of the poet himself at the “moment” of writing it.
I was struck upon that first reading by the echo of “tail” in “tale” – The long tail of the white kite seems linked (spiritually, symbolically) with the speaker’s wish that the poem’s child might live to see a day with enough time in it, and a world with enough hope in it, to tell a story. The “tale” that came to mind when I read this poem this last week was the poet’s (or speaker’s) own story, most likely a reflective (and refractive) view of the Gaza he has known, and the one he has come to know, at the time of the writing of this poem. Today, though, at the time of this particular reading (or re-copying) of the poem, what I notice as much as the echo between “tail” and “tale” is the echo that lives in the last two lines: “let it bring hope/let it be a tale.” The “tale” calls out to me as something that could be true but most likely is not, like a fairy tale or a story we tell for the pleasure of hearing it. This seems to be the kind of world the speaker is hoping for, or even praying for – the kind of world with enough space in it for his child (or any child) to savor a story, whether real or invented.
I learned today that Refaat Alareer and several of his family members were casualties of an air strike. He died at 44.
The Five O’Clock Café 