"A Few Reasons to Oppose the War" by Lisa Suhair Majaj

A Few Reasons to Oppose the War


because wind soughs in the branches of trees
like blood sighing through veins

because in each country there are songs
huddled like wet-feathered birds

because even though the news has nothing new to say
and keeps on saying it
NO still fights its way into the world

because for every bomb that is readied
a baby nestles into her mother
latches onto a nipple beaded with milk

because the tulips have waited all winter
in the cold dark earth

because each morning the wildflowers outside my window
raise their yellow faces to the sun

because we are all so helplessly in love
with the light


-Lisa Suhair Majaj



From Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press 2009). Used by permission.

Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian-American writer and scholar, was born in Iowa, raised in Amman, Jordan, educated in Beirut, Lebanon and in Michigan, and after spending many years in Massachusetts currently lives in Nicosia, Cyprus. Her poems and essays have been published in more than fifty journals and anthologies across in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, and have been used in art installations, photography exhibits and political forums, as well as in more traditional venues. Her recently published poetry volume, Geographies of Light, won the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. She is also co-editor of three collections of critical essays: Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland/Routledge 2000), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland Publishing 2002), and Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women's Novels (Syracuse University Press, 2002).

Majaj appeared on the panel Women & War/Women & Peace: International Voices duing Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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