We were not born for footnotes.
We speak not in tongues they codify,
but in olive groves, burnt
and replanted
by hands too calloused to write grants.
Our vernacular is the crack
in the wall we built overnight,
not the echo of Geneva’s gavel.

They ask what is being said
but never who speaks
from the rubble,
from tents as old as nations.
They want dialogue,
but not dialect,
peace,
but not the pieces we carve out of every silence.

Do not reduce us
to an identity boxed in an index:
Arab,
Middle Eastern,
Gazan,
“subject of concern.”
We are not their case study
nor their civilised savage
who bleeds according to statute.

We do not cease.
We are unimagined
by a world built to forget us
because imperial comfort sleeps soundly
on the lullabies of our dead.

The moral stench came
before the legal definition.
It is not genocide
because the court says so.
It is genocide
because my grandmother’s village
is now a forest of foreign names.

And you, intellectual,
with your hauteur wrapped in footnotes,
do not lecture the wretched
on acceptable forms of rage.
Do not demand our resistance
be dressed in the language
that rendered us killable in the first place.

We do not seek your recognition.
We seek return.
Not to appeal to your institutions
but to remind you:
we were always more
than a clause
in your jurisprudence.
We were the soil
before the state,
the scream
before the statement.

So let the world mispronounce us
we will continue to speak
in the accent
of the land.