Lucid Dreaming

It is difficult to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for the lack of what is found there.

—William Carlos Williams

If you want the news about Palestine, walk through the hall of distorting mirrors that is our media. If you want the truth about the Palestinian experience, read Deema Shehabi's debut poetry collection, Thirteen Departures from the Moon. Arresting every communicable feature of language, this poet sings the haunted songs of war, occupation, exile, and abiding love, imploring readers to remember, each moment, that the political is and always has been painfully personal.

Some of Shehabi's poems roll forward in linear narratives populated by gripping, resonant images, as in these lines from "Helwa's Stories":

I found the young soldier searching the house;he was merely a boy, but he leaned forward with tethering eyes.I locked him deep in the cellar and planted the key

in the cavity between my breasts where no hands daredto tread. Ah the look of freedom as it flitted desperatelyfrom his eyes—he promised never again to beat on our door

before dawn, never again before the tiny orange threadappeared in the sky. He spent a whole day down there recitinghis dreams into ruins of rancid olive oil and dried-up yoghurt.

More often, though, Shehabi's words float unmoored from linear narrative. Through an alchemy of metaphor, fragmentation, and repetition, these poems evoke the essence of exile: disorientation, loss, longing, and grief, spiked with fierce love. Take for example this excerpt from "Requiem for Arrival":

Promise never to tellthat this is only a dream,

a morning dream, clipped by leaf's edge—my mother leaning

against the balcony balustrade,

her hands migrating

            toward a jasmine flower,

her fingers enfolding it            and bringing it slowly

to her freckled lips,

and she says: Do not leave now that you are here—Stay, so the world may become itself again.

The world kept dwellingin small rooms, dissonant sounds,

here below Mt. Diablowhere my child's eyes depose

the moon. In the valley,he chases birds

through the lifts of hills,and on certain nights,

I see another moonlit                refugee child

netting birds over                barbed-wire fences.

Barbed-wire inscribes the blighton the Holy City at dawn,

the rotten-plum light scaldingthe mouths of fallen houses,

the seven-year-old boy surrenderinghis belongings under a soldier's

tightly stitched breath

Throughout this eight-section poem, the words that link each section's last and first lines, like "world" and "barbed-wire" here, suggest cohesion, a sense of wholeness, and yet everything in the poem is about breaking apart—the rending of country, household, and family.

This kind of visceral tension—opposing forces insisting on their presence in the same poetic space— buzzes throughout the collection. In these lines from "Ghazal 2," the opposing forces take the form of "war" and "lilac":

The girl wails over her father's body on a beach that hiveswith warships as though she's dressed in fireballs of lilac....I will return one day, she says, to light the lamp of my snuffed-outcountry, to translate the original protocol of lilac....Shahid, how often did you "land on ashen tarmacs"landing—then flying—your feet hauled by lilac?....If you don't let my son return to his mother, says the fatherto the interrogator, your body will be mauled by lilac.

While many poems such as "Ghazal 2" depict battles between external forces, others wage wrestling matches of the psyche, as in these lines from "Legends of the Bee":

Body: be obedient in your yielding. I can't    tell you what this            rapture means.

....What is death? A stained-glass jar where sun    meets gold.

....Let's tell it like it is: I was never ready to lose    you, over and            over again.

....Open the window to the orchard in the dis-    tance. I'm yielding            to the light.

No matter what kind of tension she is...