Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself

—Fady Joudah, […]

I condemn the blooded river that became a sea

we cannot crawl out of. I condemn the bulldozers

That, as if silkworms, shoveled our corpses into the sea.

I condemn the caterpillar of gears, the puma of sweat

shops, the hijacking of stars & bucks, & never the fall

of entities from such withholdings. I condemn the poets

that slur activists, the poetry identifying as activism, as if

any artist of empire knew what it meant to shred fences,

to hijack, to put one’s own body on the line for their people.

I condemn those who say our morals have come at the expense

of our dreaming. I condemn that the pearly-gated hijacking of Yaffa

in which I walked was once the dream of illiterate men. I condemn

their entire imagination, the need to make, of nature’s lines & expanses,

a border, less capacious dreaming. Terror has a name and it is boundless we—

The world at stake is just more Palestine to free—

I condemn the river, I condemn the sea.