Here are a couple of poems with a location that is important and distressing to me, Palestine, where I had a connection while working in a Palestine refugee camp near Amman in Jordan in 1968/69. The catastrophic situation of Palestinians oppressed by Israel then has become genocidal, and while poems are not going to change that, I have vivid memories of men sitting with coffees in the camp and in the marketplace in Amman, reading aloud to each other from Arabic texts. I assumed these were news updates and in a sense they were, but what I learned from my colleagues and students there was that they were more than likely poems by the likes of Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan. So I share them here in a spirit of empathy and dismay at the plight of the persecuted Palestinian refugees and survivors in their decimated homelands. These are among the different ones in a proposed collection Being Here – Selected Poems 2020 – 2025, currently in a publication queue.

Salaam aleikum!

Ian Wedde

From Palestine Poems 

1. The View from Here

Looking west from our second
floor I see foregrounded the
demurely venetianed
ranks of identical white
neighbourly units with here
and there a barbeque on
the first-floor patio or
a sun brolly with folded
chairs and sometimes
a frugal pot-plantation
of aromatic herbs, and
directly opposite some
bamboo stakes holding up an
early assortment of green
tomatoes – sometimes I can
see the busy outline of
a neighbour in their kitchen
window as they prepare an
evening meal (the sun is just
down beyond the western range)
and cars have begun to nudge
into their lit garages
under welcoming kitchens
with sometimes an ‘I’m home’ toot –
what goes on in those private
neighbourly situations
will only be revealed to
eyes that should know better and
go up to their top floor and
look out west past the ranked roofs
of neighbours and their modest
secrets at the distant grey-
green, back-lit skyline of the
sinuous Waitakeres
as far as the eye can see
across the dim horizon
with sudden shards of late light
reflected from the tranquil
estuary where distant
miniature house-clusters
leave just enough space for these
flashes that ambush me with
nauseating memories
of 1969 and
the Israeli rockets I
saw striking refugee camps
near Amman in Jordan – but
Palestine/Lebanon
is where those missiles have been
directed these past months, they
remind me of Mahmoud
Darwish’s great Diary of
a Palestinian Wound –
‘O brave-faced wound
      my homeland isn’t a suitcase
        and I’m not a traveller.
        I am the lover and the land is the beloved.’
– a far cry from ‘the first-floor
patio’ or ‘skyline of
the Waitakere hills’, or
‘sudden shards of late light’ – but
then not far at all, not a
far cry, but a cry to be
heard over and over in
the in-your-face view from here. 

2: 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 and it in us.

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde was born in October 1946 (shortly after his twin brother David) in Blenheim, New Zealand. He and Dave spent much of their childhoods in different parts of the world with their peripatetic parents or else in boarding/education institutions without parents, and Ian continued these travelling ways when grown-up, living in several different places including Jordan. He has published quite a lot of books both fiction, essays and poetry, has been New Zealand Poet Laureate, and was awarded an ONZM for services to literature. He now lives in Auckland, a city he’s very fond of, with his wife Donna Malane and beloved dog Maxi. He has a new book of poetry, Being Here, awaiting publication.