“Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks …
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!”
– Identity card, Mahmoud Darwish
The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing
against a white stone…
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ‘way up high.
It went away I’m sure because it wished
to kiss the world goodbye.
For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto
But I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live in here,
In the ghetto.
The poem was written at Theresienstadt concentration camp on 4 June 1942. On September 29, 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz where he died. Pavel Friedmann was born January 7 1921, in Prague, and deported to Terezín* on April 26, 1942.
I can't decide what color wings to wear to Paris Fashion Week.
I wanna fuck I wanna fly I want this smile to be a permanent fixture I wanna be the the thing you think about in bed 'cause baby streetlights blow out when I walk by
I want plastic surgery I want rhinoplasty I want filler I want me I want you I want to grow wings just for you to chain me by the ankle to the basement floor and right before you leave right before you close that fucking door
I'll thank you for the body glitter on the concrete because it's something to look at and I'm
Check out the new poetry I penned which touched on several topics on addictions, wokeness and life.
Afar, the high danglesI run up the slippery rockwatched my life tangleinto the hangman’s knot
Every man gambleson each, with all that he’s worthhis life on a game of Scrabblewhere numbers lean on his word
The priestess worshipsin the hotbed of menand as the soil toughensshe raises the cub as a hen
The river pushes to landbrothers who were once lostleaving writs on the sandeach trader bears his…
Illustration by E. M. Lilien for the "Lieder des Lebens" (or "Song of Life") section of Morris Rosenfeld's poetry collection Lieder des Ghetto, Berlin, 1902.
[Paul] Celan, whose parents were murdered at a camp in the Transnistria Governorate, translated Shakespeare while interned in a ghetto. For him, language was a project to be wrestled with. He believed it was possible for language to make something happen; and even if it didn’t make something happen, then at least it was worthwhile trying. He held people to account for loose language (his short correspondence with Heidegger, that phenomenologist, are extraordinary in their critique), and demanded that attention be paid to the impact that words can have in public.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, from his essay “The possibilities of language”, published at the Poetry Unbound substack, March 26, 2023