On ROCK FLIGHT by Hasib Hourani (Prototype, 2024)
In this most timely of tomes, slim as the sling
It espouses, Hasib Hourani, a Lebanese Palestinian poet,
Makes practice perfect by containing survival itself
In a box. Still under 30 he builds structure and sense
For all ages; from how to make a sling, throat
And State shudder, to how these piercing poems
In reading could bring an Israeli soldier and soul
Into shock. Forced at five months old into flight
Because the suffocating state induced ‘elsewhere’
Hourani’s poems are slogans written on the box’s side
And all walls: graffiti as script to make the room read
And stone sensate to the needs of all victims
And to the secret heart’s howl and call.
Each entry holds life. Each line stokes instruction.
The rocks that are airborne through violent throw
Or by dream have so much more than their mass,
As the weight of words aches and anchors,
‘What warrants a war?/Beauty (my Dad said this)’
As Hourani and his cousins are ‘refugees
By inheritance’ quickly learning what statelessness
Truly means. These words then are wounds
As well as weapons. This young man attains wisdom
Not from the mount but from man and his/their
Misdoings, myth made from so called faith
Spiked by hatred, as Torture Methods Employed
By the State of Israel shows the plan
To disseminate and destroy. So these become
Holy pages; prototypes for a writing of actual use
To the hand. For this book can be cast
In the wretched face of oppressors and appeal
To the angels, horrifically made as we write
Inside the box, be it cell, cave, or coffin, to breathe
Despite suffocation as Israel folds Arab air, squeezing
The sweet, and forcing chazeret’s bitter burden
Into the oxygen breathed by babies before
They are bombed: air as plight.
The rocks are flocks on the wane as well as
The pain endured and they haunt him. With a stone city
As kingdom, a surrounding barren plain, a dead sea
The images accumulate in my eye as I think
Of the clime they’re controlling and how
Through patrolling the Gaza strips brazenly
All of dignity, grace and truly religious observance
Witnessing God’s idea as imagined before
The results disappoint Hourani’s generation
And those beside and before and then after,
For whom the box as theme for these writings
Could be both a place to preserve and anoint
A fresh form of life, comprised of two viewpoints,
Before these chosen people chose a different path
Leading not to Jerusalem, say, or to where the GSS
Drags its bodies, but deeper still to a circle
Somewhere beneath Dante’s ninth. Hell feels wide.
Hourani’s prose and poetry light a way with a skin
Scorching torch and without recourse to a Beatrice.
Here, he as Virgil observes Dante as a David
No longer certain or sure of his side. Goliath is felled
But the stones still spin across skyscapes,
Spilling spite, staining, spurning because of a wrecked
And ruined spin on past pride.
‘In trying to build a metaphor I end up on the living room
floor scrolling images of dead water birds, arrows in their bodies’
He writes and the book is born from such musings.
There is breath as bomb in one poem: ‘it is not air/
it is muscle making room for nothing’ And he ends
With a vision of bullet train hope which astounds.
But that is hardly the point. This is a manual made
For perception, seeded by survival, the true fruit
In all flesh, faith is found. So, bite into this book
And through the stone and the sour, you in turn
Will taste sweetness stirred by the wise, into wine
To bolster the blood, not of Christ, or Mohamed
Or Yahweh, but of those for whom the sad scramble
Through ruin and warp leads to rhyme, or the form
Of rhyme made by souls if not from words’
Small constructions; for the Palestinians
And all victims who fall fighting now to rebuild
And to live in either the shadow of God
Or under the sun-stoked spell of survival.
These poems are a stone’s throw away
From solution. So, break the box
Which confines you, as this poet does.
Claim what’s killed.
David Erdos 30/10/2024
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