Digital Poetics 3.5 ‘Word for Faith’ and ‘Homecoming’ by Rana Banna
Photo of Graffiti in West Bank, Palestine (taken in 2018 by the author). Arabic writing translates to ‘The Third Intifada: The Jerusalem Intifada’
Word for Faith
Took Word for faith
and disappeared down the yawning throat of extinction,
imperceptible in the kiss
between bullet and temple
where lifeless heads keel
and sterile snipers lull whimpering children to sleep
with the pulsing motors of Wrangler Jeeps.
Deconstruct native homes brick by bone
uproot naive groves flames
where mothers cleave to cloven graves
extirpate in faithless crusades
for gaudy, dripping carnival parks.
Encroach on Augustan outdoor stage
safeguarded by an encyclopaedic schoolboy,
Pompeii, on lifted hillsides
for a bulging man from Long Island with a measuring tape.
Gloss and gloze in periphrasis
courtrooms dilate mouths with stale air
that expired the oath.
Holding breaths and imposing, russet keys,
green-stained thumbs press fat tawny cheeks,
that speak.
Homecoming
Herded into clustered vestibule
compress indigenous flesh to imperial jewels
daunt the pull of return yet
we are eternally sanguine.
Vacant cases await wistful flavours,
false saviours dubiously smirk and feign subjection,
delay defer questions for long, hungry hours,
spy us unravel:
translucent,
diaphanous,
veiny,
fingering blue glass beads
crack seeds between teeth,
deflect a malevolent gaze that scornfully
evades.
‘And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?’
I bleet ignorance
hard swallow place and name
that we might plant soles into our Eden
roaming as lambs;
no imperial wolf
building prodigious terminals from
white, Jerusalem stone
pinching and profiting from handfuls
of our dedicated earth scorched,
where extended roots recoil
speared by flagpoles.
We yield from nature’s generative art
a quincuncial garden farmed by swarthy, knowing hands
whipping beaded Roman trees
drizzling gold into white and black scarves on knees
a geometrically embroidered chorus
sway and harvest and press
to viscous green
anoint flat loaves in torrential stream,
respite atop level roofs
squinting at winking at stars,
languid eucalyptus branches lend sympathetic tips
filled beneath with laughing
children
sharpen twigs to carve signatures
of alchemical belonging:
that is our homecoming.
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Rana Banna is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at UCL, writing her thesis on early modern conceptions of semiotics as ‘word-magic’ in Shakespeare’s late plays. As a British-born Palestinian her poetry considers settler-colonialism, resistance against occupation, and homeland from the perspective of displacement. Her writing is characterised by an interest in semiotics and etymologies, influenced by such thinkers as Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Edward Said.
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
