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A Few Reasons to Oppose the War

By Lisa Suhair Majaj

because wind soughs in the branches of trees
like blood sighing through veins

because in each country there are songs
huddled like wet-feathered birds

because even though the news has nothing new to say
and keeps on saying it
NO still fights its way into the world

because for every bomb that is readied
a baby nestles into her mother
latches onto a nipple beaded with milk

because the tulips have waited all winter
in the cold dark earth

because each morning the wildflowers outside my window
raise their yellow faces to the sun

because we are all so helplessly in love
with the light

 

 

 

Listen as Lisa Suhair Majaj reads "A Few Reasons to Oppose the War."
Added: Thursday, July 17, 2014  /  From "Geographies of Light" (Del Sol Press 2009). Used with permission.
Lisa Suhair Majaj
Photo by Andreas Alexandrou.

Lisa Suhair Majaj is author of Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press Poetry Prize winner) and co-editor of Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women's Novels (Syracuse University Press), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland Publishing) and Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland/Routledge). Her writing, which includes poetry, creative nonfiction, critical essays, children’s writing and more, has been translated into several languages. She has read at international venues including London's Poetry International. In 2015 she participated in the World Court of Women Against War in India. Her poetry was included in the 2016 exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East (Harn Museum of Art). She lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.

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