A Palestinian Poet writes about exile

We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if traveling
Is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the
                Darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees.
And we said to our wives: go on giving birth to people like us               
                For hundreds of years so we can complete this journey
To the hour of a country, to a meter of the impossible.
We travel in the carriages of the psalms, sleep in the tents of the
                Prophets and come out of the speech of the gypsies.
We measure space with a hoopoe’s beak or sing to while away the               
                Distance and cleanse the light of the moon.
Your path is long so dream of seven women to bear this long path
On your shoulders. Shake for them palm trees so as to know their
                Names and who’ll be the mother of the boy of Galilee.
We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of               
                This travel.
                                              — Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like Other People” (1984)¹

Janet Smith - Southern Poetry Review

The Children's Section

As a child I sat on stiff chairs
and read. None belonged to me.
I could be pushed out by someone
larger. I owned nothing, not even 
my face when a hand approached to
lift the bangs from my eyes, not even
an unbroken hour. I planned to read
every book in the children’s section.
I began with A and read about
archaeology and Antarctica.
Some words had a flavor: zodiac,
periwinkle, bracelet, savannah.
They held a space I could breathe in.

Childhood is a fierce land where
the laughing sounds like crying.
It felt safe to sit on the metal kitchen
chair left to rust behind the lilacs,
a library book splayed on my lap.
The heart meanwhile knocked on its
own door and waited in its warm locker
while the long years ahead stood
orderly on a shelf until my full pardon
would be granted. I wrote lists
of the titles of the books I’d read
as slow tides pulled me through
the locks of days. I read as I walked
to school, the margins holding me.

Adrienne Rich

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”