let us lay our babies down
to rest, like the sand rests
as beach, as boundary
between land and sea
rest, here, habaybi
wake as water,
as clay
dead or alive, Gaza
you will always be my people
never as caged
collectively tortured
human animals
together, Palestine
we enter humanity
haunting our way out
here, out in the open,
as barefoot warriors,
with Gaza’s sand
between our toes
still, we are alone
genocide feels like
the only Palestinian left in the world
is yourself
starved
collapsing
into immaterial,
material
of noplace
notime
our homes, our graves
No –
our graves, our homes
children digging out children from the debris
of other children’s bodies
our babies writing their names
on their hands
without hands
left
only my head, spine,
and intestines hang
separated from what I used to call my body
which was never my own
now, held up in the hands of a passerby,
snatched out of the sea
of our ruins
but the world sees me now
when they did not before
the world sees me now
as a bloody rag
as material, as debris
as dust
noname
because even my severed hands
with my name’s calligraphy
are lost under the rubble
this is not death
we are treated as the world’s waste
sent to the settler landfill
where we poison colonial waters,
and eventually, flow back into the sea
crashing upon the beach
as wave, once again
as sand
resting in this sacred boundary
cast across all thresholds of empathy
between
ocean and land
still defiant, patient, healing, and resisting the settler’s certainty, the colonial category, the usthem
binary, we are all the beach of Gaza, fighting for a future where Palestine is already
flourishing
where we can rest with our dead, tethering tomorrow’s terraces with jasmine flowers
and the aroma of home, as we gaze out towards Gaza’s sea, long after fortress Israel, and all
this world’s colonial states, are only memory – here, there, then, and now – we will be free
I know this viscerally, an impossible pain I hold in my bones, transformed in the care and caress
of my love, whose kiss holds and releases, all at the same time, like only real freedom can
how do we make Palestinian love, on the day the bombing began, naked, wet, with complete
agony and eternity’s desire?
we found our way to the sand
where we held each other in
beside the water, heat of fire, and somehow
beneath the stars
she wrote her name on my hand
-Devin George Atallah
Dr. Devin George Atallah is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a diaspora Palestinian from the US and Chile. Dr. Atallah is an activist, researcher, practitioner, writer, and healer dedicated to decolonial movements and Palestinian liberation. Dr. Atallah co-developed a Palestinian decolonial healing workbook that is free and available online through MayFly Books entitled: CURCUM’s Trees.
