Hadeel’s Song
by Hanan Ashrawi

Some words are hard to pronounce –
He-li-cop-ter is most vexing
       (A-pa-che or Co-bra is impossible)
But how it can stand still in the sky
I cannot understand –
  What holds it up
    What bears its weight
(Not clouds, I know)
It sends a flashing light-so-smooth –
  It makes a deafening sound
    The house shakes
  (There are holes in the wall by my bed)
Flash-boom-light-sound –
And I have a hard time sleeping
(I felt ashamed when I wet my bed,
  but no one scolded me.)

Plane – a word much easier to say –
  It flies, tayyara,
My mother told me
A word must have a meaning
A name must have a meaning
Like mine,
  (Hadeel, the cooing of the dove.)
Tanks, though, make a different sound
  They shudder when they shoot
Dabbabeh is a heavy word
  As heavy as its meaning.

Hadeel-the-dove – she coos
  Tayyara – she flies
    Dabbabeh – she crawls
My Mother – she cries
  And cries and cries
My-Brother-Rami – he lies
  DEAD
    And lies and lies, his eyes
      Closed.
Hit by a bullet in the head
  (bullet is female lead – raisa – she kills,
  my pencil is male lead – rasas – he writes)
What’s the difference between a shell and a bullet?
(What’s five hundred-milli-meter –
  Or eight-hundred-milli-meter-shell?)
Numbers are more vexing than words –
  I count to ten, then ten-and-one, ten-and-two
  But what happens after ten-and-ten,
How should I know?
Rami, my brother, was one
  Of hundreds killed –
They say thousands are hurt,
But which is more
  A hundred or a thousand
  (miyyeh or alf)
    I cannot tell –
      So big – so large – so huge –
Too many, too much.
Palestine – Falasteen – I’m used to,
  It’s not so hard to say,
It means we’re here – to stay –
  Even though the place is hard
    On kids and mothers too
For soldiers shoot
  And airplanes shell
    And tanks boom
      And tear gas makes you cry
(Though I don’t think it’s tear gas that makes
  my mother cry.)
I’d better go and hug her
  Sit in her lap a while
    Touch her face (my fingers wet)
      Look in her eyes
Until I see myself again
  A girl within her mother’s sight.

If words have meaning, Mama,
  What is Is-ra-el?
What does a word mean
If it is mixed
  with another –
If all soldiers, tanks, planes and guns are
Is-ra-el-i
    What are they doing here
In a place I know
    In a word I know – (Palestine)
        In a life that I no longer know?

Hanan Ashrawi is the Commissioner of Information and Public Policy for the League of Arab States and the Secretary General of Miftah, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy. She is also a member of the Palestinian legislative council. Her poem is printed here with permission from Cornerstone, which published the poem in Autumn 2001 (Issue 22). Cornerstone is published by the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center (www.sabeel.org).