The Book of Sumud
Rent from DeepDyve- The Book of Sumud
They’ll try to make you read the Book of the Dead,written by the victorious men behind desks. Do not
believe those dusty revelations. They’ll tell youyou’re banished, they’ll say you were never
here, a land without a people for a people without a land.You’ll say you live in exile, but you’ll also say
your womb is a refuge from monsters. You’ll knowwhat grows inside is the greatest act of defiance—
creation. Men can build monuments biggerthan men, but never bigger than the graveyard
of bones below it. In Jenin, a giant horse standsrigid, patched together with scrap metal
left after an attack. This is yours—what’s destroyed can be transformed. This is ours—
the tea we pass around the table, the songs, the spirit,the things they cannot take. Your baby will be a boy,
and his first word will be wall, as he watches his brothersshaking tin cans, as he listens to the tick inside them rattle, [End Page 147]
afraid something will break. You’ve nevermet a man without demons, all of them possessed.
Their names will be written against their willin the Book of Heroes and you believe this is love.
This is love. Your sons will graffiti vibrant murals of peaceon the wall and you’ll hope the colors are brighter
than blood, hope the world will listen. It mightor it won’t: it will respond only with grey blankness
like the other side of the wall.It will give you the Book of Plagues
and tell you to read. Don’t read it.Lie intimately with your destruction, let it snake
around your pulse, let it cramp your muscles.Someday, you pray the Hydra of war
comes with its many-headed machinesand smashes it to ruins. Your sons will pull
each stone away, and they’ll writethe Book of the Living. It will be called Sumud.
Sumud means “steadfastness” in Arabic. [End Page 148]
Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013) and the Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared on or in Verse Daily, Pinch, PANK Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, Redivider, New South, and elsewhere. She was a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a St. Botolph Emerging Writer’s Grant nominee, and a Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop participant. She holds degrees in behavioral psychology and creative writing from Western Michigan University and received her mfa in poetry from Emerson College. She currently teaches writing and literature at Wheelock College in Boston.
