Between bloodroot beginning

to flower              and an evacuation zone,

our time on earth careens toward

what exactly? 

 

Settlers aimed their God

at the Delaware and Wyandot

and named the stolen land for

                             a land stolen seven years later.

If you look for

Palestine,

you’ll see it everywhere.

                   Between track and axle,

 

between river and sea.

When the people look up

and the sky derails. It can happen anywhere—

the fire that unfurls a seed.

Discussion Questions

  1. What parallels does the poem draw between a rural village in Ohio and Palestine? Where do the lands coalesce and diverge? What do the dichotomies illuminate about colonialism in the US and in Palestine?  
     
  2. How does nature function in the poem? When is it a symbol? Metaphor? Witness?
     
  3. Identify language or imagery that suggests invasion or borders. What do these choices convey about the speaker’s attitude? How do they shape your own?
     
  4. Does the poem argue for resistance? If so, where and how?

About Ruth Awad

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American author of two books of poetry: Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, which won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. A 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, she is also the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently appearing in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón, and can be found in The Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, Waxwing, and elsewhere.

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