Gauze

By Lisa Suhair Majaj

when you learn that “gauze” comes from Gaza
you will begin to understand how light
passing through translucent fabric illuminates
the delicate porous openings between threads
that interweave to allow molecules of air
and light to flow from one place to another
without blockade or border, and you will learn
how gauze allows us to see, though dimly,
through the haze of grief shrouding
what is soft and vulnerable, like the length
of fabric a child steals from her mother
to drape across a table for a hideaway,
peering out without understanding
what is happening, too young to know,
yet, that there is no hiding in Gaza,
and through this haze you may be able
to glimpse the ones still alive this morning
before the bombs found them, murmuring
about hunger and the absence of bread,
the softness within them reverberating
like an echo past their now-crushed bodies,
and as you turn away in anguish or despair
or shame perhaps you will remember
that gauze is also used to cover wounds,
layering gently over the bleeding place,
of which Gaza has so many we cannot
stop counting, and perhaps you too
will begin to see through the haze
of denial and scream STOP

Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian American, is the author of Geographies of Light (2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize), poems and essays in many journals and anthologies across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and two children’s books. She is also a scholar of Arab American literature, and co-editor of three volumes of critical essays on Arab, Arab American, and other international women of color writers. Her poetry has been translated into a number of languages, including Arabic, and was displayed as part of the 2016 exhibition “Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East” (Harn Museum of Art). Her grandmother came from Jaffa and her father, born in Birzeit, grew up in Jerusalem. Majaj was born in the US, grew up in Jordan, studied in Lebanon during the war years, evacuated on a refugee boat during the 1982 Israeli invasion and was abducted to Israel for interrogation, and then spent 20 years in the US. Since 2001, she has lived in Cyprus, as close to Palestine as she can get.

Photo credit: Liz West via a Creative Commons license.

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