Protest

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book SHAHR-E-JAANAAN: THE CITY OF THE BELOVED (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Margins, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net finalist and a Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of an Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House.

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Protest

—for Aya

Each night is a night
of slaughter;  

in the shadows
children dress in tatters,

parched, glass-eyed. Children
whose homes are ash,

children plastered
in cement and blood. 

The world doesn’t care about us,
you say. You’ve gone

from displacement to displacement

searching for life,
for rest, yet  

every evening,
the bombing starts again. 

And I want to say, look!
our streets are alive: 

banners flare & drums
beat and quicken 

like hearts. Night
after night, Aya, 

the world

is a sea chanting
Gaza, Gaza, Gaza— 

but what do I say beyond this?

Aya, I never wanted
to write your name in a poem. 

Aya, I wanted you to be eternal.

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