Zeeshan Joonam
@ZeeshanJaanam
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Columbia University trained poet & translator. MFA @Columbia . Author of The Minister of Disturbances ( @DiodeEditions , '20) Poetry Editor @pestemagazine
New York, New York
Joined November 2017
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❤❤ Friends! I am thrilled to share THE MINISTER OF DISTURBANCES. This book of poems which I wrote at Columbia University with the mystic guidance of the late Lucie Brock-Broido is forthcoming from the marvelous
@DiodeEditions
.
Winner of the Diode Editions 2019 Book Prize!
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According to reports, children in Gaza are dying from cardiac arrest because they haven't slept in 2 or 3 months & the constant bombardment by IOF has caused their bodies to continously release adrenaline which is damaging their hearts.
What a horrific world we are living in 💔
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Be careful, when a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.
—Albert Camus
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“What was my crime? What heinous deed did I commit for me to deserve to get shot and lose control of my legs? I was Palestinian.”
—Hisham Awartani
[Brown University student & math genius & Palestinian; he was paralyzed after a hate crime attack in Vermont near his home.]
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"Every bombed village is my hometown.”
—James Baldwin
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“We are citizens of the most powerful country in the world, and it is a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on Earth. I want you to feel what that means.”
―Audre Lorde
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Carrying his dead baby brother. Unknown boy in Nagasaki after nuclear blast.
Reminds me of countless images from Gaza in 2024. This photograph was taken 79 years ago.
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The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe. And I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.
—James Baldwin
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I wish children didn't die.
—Ghassan Kanafani
▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎
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The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.
—James Baldwin
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
—James Baldwin
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Tell them
the olives ripened
no one to gather them
the children
did not gather
nor ripen
tell them
—Suheir Hammad
▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎
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As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom.
—Arundhati Roy
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
—James Baldwin
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“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.”
— James Baldwin
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Federico García Lorca, who changed poetry forever, was executed by fascist forces in Spain on this day.
His body has never been found. (Died on August 19, 1936.)
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"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
—James Baldwin
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Then the flowers became very wild...
—Grace Paley, "September"
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To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
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This boy has found his cat alive in the ruins of his home in Gaza.
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The attempt to silence the legendary writer Arundhati Roy from India must be condemned by all free speech advocates. She has done nothing wrong. She is an intellectual and moral giant.
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As a writer, if you know something and then you keep quiet, it’s like dying.
—Arundhati Roy
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The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
—Ellen Bass
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Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
―Louise Glück
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“We are citizens of the most powerful country in the world, and it is a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on Earth. I want you to feel what that means.”
―Audre Lorde
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My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
—Louise Glück, RIP
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Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
—Louise Glück, Rest in Poetry
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In this short Life that only lasts an hour merely
How much—how little—is within our power.
—Emily Dickinson
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Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious, because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.
—Louise Glück, RIP
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The iconography of mother as a sacred being / the sacred between mother and child captured in two images across time.
[photo from Alex Shams]
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The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
—Ellen Bass
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Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious, because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.
—Louise Glück
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We deserve a better death.
—Mosab Abu Toha
▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎
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I wake up & it breaks my heart.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations In An Emergency"
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The god who gave me a poet's heart
Will know how to forgive me.
—Forough Farrokhzad
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"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
—Joan Didion (1934-2021)
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We love what we have, no matter how little,
because if we don't, everything will be gone.
—Mosab Abu Toha
▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎
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I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart which is happening in my country.
—James Baldwin
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Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish wrote this poem almost a decade ago.
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The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
—Ellen Bass
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You become political when you can no longer endure the world.
—Marguerite Duras
[French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker]
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A poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other.
—Charles Simic
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"That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe."
— Walter Benjamin
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I wake up & it breaks my heart.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations In An Emergency"
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The short poem, as Charles Simic once said, is a match flaring up in a dark universe.
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I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened
—Nikki Giovanni
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Alessandra Sanguinetti, "Portrait of Modern Palestinian Childhood," 2004.
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Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
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I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe. But now I think that poetry changes only the poet.
—Mahmoud Darwish
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I wake up & it breaks my heart.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations In An Emergency"
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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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I never have been in despair about the world. I’ve been enraged by it. I don’t think I’m in despair. I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece. You can’t tell the children there’s no hope.
James Baldwin
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What I didn't know before was how horses simply give birth to other horses.
—Ada Limón
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
—Adrienne Rich
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How lucky we are
That you can't sell
A poem...
—Gregory Orr
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Without tenderness, we are all in hell.
—Adrienne Rich
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Now I have become one of those people.
—Lydia Davis, "Writing"
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And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.
—Kim Addonizio, "Stolen Moments"
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Years do odd things to identity.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Leaves”
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Without tenderness, we are all in hell.
—Adrienne Rich
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The beloved said, "When will we meet?
I said, "A year after the war ends."
The beloved said, "When will the war end?"
I said, "When we meet."
—Mahmoud Darwish
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I wake up & it breaks my heart.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations In An Emergency"
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I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.
—Louise Glück
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The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
— Agha Shahid Ali
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I wake up & it breaks my heart.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations In An Emergency"
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I am besieged by land and air and sea and language.
—Mahmoud Darwish
▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎
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The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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Where are the senior editors of the American poetry presses? And the publishers? Do they not have a stake in the release of a prominent US educated poet who has recently been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award?
#StopGenocideInGazaNow
#FreeMosab
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"to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands"
—Ellen Bass, "The Thing Is"
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Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
—Lydia Davis, "Head, Heart"
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I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds / & the thrill of rain breaks my heart.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations in An Emergency"
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What I do worry about is the fact that writers have become so frightened of being political. The idea that writers are being reduced to creators of a product that is acceptable, that slips down your throat, which readers love and therefore can be bestsellers, that’s so dangerous.
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@GringaLandia
I'm not sure what we can do except speak out, call our reps, go to protests, share Palestinian voices & poets, pray, & never forget.
Our govt under Biden has made it clear they are not going to allow a ceasefire until much more damage is done.
We must resist with our hearts.
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what we remember of love is starlight
—W.S. Merwin, "To the Parting Year"
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
—James Baldwin
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Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious, because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.
—Louise Glück
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265
1K
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
— Agha Shahid Ali
5
264
1K
The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
—Ellen Bass
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311
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"When my second husband shouted, 'Me or your writing!' I replied, 'My writing.' We separated."
―Nawal El-Saadawi
▪︎ Egyptian writer & physician ▪︎
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Come back,
and scream as you want and break all the vases.
—Khaled Juma
▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎
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Students at Columbia University showing all the adults in the country how to oppose a genocide.
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Also, please consider donating to his recovery fund if possible. Disability costs are tremendous for the type of spinal injury this innocent young man has suffered. Thank you for your generosity and humanity, friends.
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