without a word

if the word for this is   Palestine
this love    this steadfastness

if this word becomes     again
unutterable    unspeakable

if this word   Palestine   disappears
if this work      of being

If a word, a life, the life
of a people      of a land

is taken    disappeared
    stolen            between 
    
the time   starved for months,
              of this poem

denied food            
   its writing      and

without   water  and the now 
    medicine
      
         of your     years 
  under siege   reading

living in rubble  
      you are reading it

a reign of bombs 
                        now    

dying in rubble
  what then

what then?
  what will we do?
           
    you 
I           who?
   
 will anyone    make it stop?
bring it  them!  back?    home?

this word  this land   this people
if the word for this is 

 Palestine   
it is          genocide

Copyright © 2024 by Trish Salah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem was written with an eye toward its own untimeliness, its weakness. Poetry does not prevent massacres. It cannot undo bombs, snipers’ bullets, mass starvation, sickness. The poem invokes the divide between the time of its composition, early January 2024, and the time when it might reach a reader, months or years later. From within that divide, it refuses the inevitability of Palestinian death, the unspeakability of Palestinian resistance, endurance, sumud, and the violent silencing which is everywhere being visited upon the people of Palestine and we who support them. It is something like a prayer, or grief, or condemnation.”
—Trish Salah