Translator’s Note: The following poem by Palestinian poet Carol Sansour was slated to appear in Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Continental drift: the Arab Europe, 2023) but was among ten poems abruptly removed by German publishers Haus für Poesie. Edited by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sylvia Geist, the ground-breaking anthology features work by thirty-one poets writing in Arabic who are based in Europe. In the introduction to the anthology, Almadhoun writes: “bitterness is virtually everywhere in the texts [in the anthology]; you can touch it and yet it slips away like water through fingers.” In this poem, bitterness is mingled with a sense of wonder inspired by the spectacular escape of six Palestinian prisoners who dug their way out of jail using spoons in 2021. In another poem which was included in the anthology, Sansour writes: “In the East there is no home without war.”
A Censored Poem
Take this city
bite it like an apple
if they kick you out
don’t be sad
cities are all hell.
Walk to the fields
strip naked
bathe in the sun
make a tent of your clothes
to shade a springing flower
don’t walk away
when the hyenas draw near;
everything around you is a predator.
Just remember
you are truly free.
* An imaginary letter written to us by an escaped prisoner, or another free man, and left this morning beneath an olive tree overlooking Marj ibn Amir.
Translation © 2024 by Katharine Halls. All rights reserved.
