Palestine poems

1: Backfire

This morning as I walk our dog Maxi
through streets silenced not by apocalypse
but by the indulgent early hour of
the summer holiday, a car backfires
making her cower, shake, and press against
my sympathetic leg, so that out of
my early Al Jazeera news items
(forty-six thousand Palestinians
killed in Gaza since that October 7, 2023)
I hear myself utter
the words I heard often on any day
back in 1969, in Amman,
Jordan, a greeting but also a kind
wish for peace, As-salamu alaykum,
and as if cued in by that memory,
Mahmoud Darwish’s Diary of a Palestinian Wound,
his Rubaiyat for Fadwa Tuqan, poet
sister of my friend Fawwaz who didn’t
bother to restrain his tears when reading
the Arabic but quenched while translating
its many verses, starting with this one
that I didn’t know I recalled until
keeping sympathetic pace with Maxi:

We’re free not to remember because Carmel’s within us
& on our eyelashes grows the grass of the Province of Galilee.
Don’t say: I wish we were running to it like the river/
Don’t say this.
We exist in the flesh of our country & it in us.

2: Baqa’a

Absurd and self-indulgent to think of
the fetch and carry of Max’s frisbee
in the tranquil early morning parkland
just down the road from our cosy place in
Three Lamps as trigger to the memory
of dead and wounded being transported to
overcrowded hospitals in Amman
from the refugee camps on the outskirts
of the city where I worked years ago …
but away it flies, the trajectory,
landing with uncertain precision whence
its consequence must be borne back to mark
memories of repeat detonations,
the intermittent yowling rise and fall
of air-raid sirens and then silence that
was soon broken by barking dogs and the
anguished blare of many car-horns racing
from Baqa’a camp fifty-six years ago
when I used to catch a bus out to the
UN relief and works agency for
Palestinian refugees camp school
where I and twenty destitute students
tried to find the place where whatever we
had in common could accommodate their
desperation and my comfortable
return to a city home at day’s end.

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde was born in Blenheim, New Zealand, in 1946. He’s lived and worked in various parts of the world including the Middle East in Jordan in 1968-69 where he collaborated with Fawwaz Tuqan, brother of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, on a book of selected poems by Mahmoud Darwish, published by Carcanet Press, England, in January 1973. He’s published seven works of fiction, thirteen of poetry, and a collection of essays, Making Ends Meet, in 2005. In the 1980s he coedited The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Poetry. He lives in Auckland with his wife the screen-writer and producer Donna Malane.

The two poems published here are from a new book in preparation, Being Here – Selected Poems 2007 – 2025.