War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens by Mohammed el-Kurd—National Poetry Month 2024

Twins Muna and Mohammed el-Kurd at a public appearance.

Mohammed el-Kurd is a 25 year old Palestinian writer and poet, who came to prominence for his description of Palestinians’ lives under occupation in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.  He has referred to evictions as a form of ethnic cleansing and has also accused Israel of imposing apartheid-style laws and regulations onto his people in the occupied territories.  Lately he has also spoken out about the oppression in the Gaza Strip in the Israel–Hamas War.

El-Kurd and his noted activist twin sister Muna el-Kurd was born in in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on May 15, 1998.  In 2009, part of his family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah was seized by Israeli settlers.  He was the main subject of the 2013 documentary film My Neighborhood by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi.  He had emigrated to the United States and settled in New York to study for a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from Brooklyn College but returned to East Jerusalem during the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis. 

The twins have hundreds of thousands of followers on X [Twitter] and millions on Instagram. While Muna’s posts are usually in Arabic, Mohammed frequently posts in English for a Western audience.  On June 6 2021, they were both detained by Israeli Police but were later released on the same day.  During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, Mohammed appeared on American television including CNN, MSNBC, and CBSN.  In 2021, Mohammed and Muna were named on the TIME 100 most influential people in the world.  

In 2021 Mohammed published Rifqa, a poetry collection reflecting the struggles of his people.

His appearances on American university campuses and at other events have been challenged with charges of anti-Semitism and Tory MPs called for his expulsion from Britain.

El-Kurd challenges Western media that regularly ask Palestinian guests to denounce violent protests or attacks by Hamas and other groups, characterizing these questions as inciting, bigoted and disrespectful. To one such question from a CNN anchor, he responded “Do you support the violent dispossession of me and my family?”. He said that the incident was an example that Palestinians will no longer accept “racism and misrepresentation” on Western television, and that like him, they “really don’t take shit” any longer.

                                                A protestor hold up a placard quoting Mohammed el-Kurd.

War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens

   after Audre Lorde.

 

There are many roots.

 

War machines are coin-operated arcade games,

and your penny sprays and juvenile plays

are just as greedy as a bulldozer’s mouth

chewing life into debris for me to dish-wash and make poetry of.

 

War machines wear lipstick, carry bedazzled purses, and wave hellohowareyou?

vogue on said debris/pink faucets. If you ignore the rubble,

this is a haven––its earth is flesh, brown and uncounted.

 

War machines are American-made, and they are never thirsty rivers in their throats.

American water is brown and dirtied and children famished,

cracked, caged in cages, in uneducated education.

Surf their boats in drought.  Their knuckles stiff, cold is this verse.

 

I sit here wondering:

 

Which me will survive bulldozers undoing God?

Which me will soak their hands in these wells?

Which me will console the dead’s loved ones with prevention, not mourning,

bottle our Jordan River to smack American thirst,

for greed and grief.

Water                            stolen or neglected.

 

Which me will survive all these liberations?

 

—Mohammed el-Kurd

 

Mohammed El-Kurd, War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens after Audre Lorde  from Rifqa © 2021 by Mohammed El-Kurd from Haymarket Books.

       

Limericks for Something Completely Different—National Poetry Month 2024

We’ve been doing some heavy lifting the past few days in the annual National Poetry Month series—grim history, heavy current events, serious religion, and a doleful look at the planet’s future.  Time to lighten things up! and what could be lighter than limericks?  Like Japanese haiku,  limericks are very short form poems with strict form.  Unlike haiku they are not ethereal, spiritual, or calming.  On the contrary they are bawdy—often lewd—disrespectful, rude, and sassy.  Even “clean” limericks for children are often rowdy, rebellious, and mischievous.

A limerick must consist of five lines. The first, second, and fifth lines must have seven to ten syllables while rhyming and having the same verbal rhythm. The third and fourth lines only have to have five to seven syllables and have to rhyme with each other and have the same rhythm.  That’s an a-a-b-b-a rhyme scheme for those of you keeping score at home.

The form appeared in England in the early 18th Century and was  popularized by Edward Lear, an artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, now known mostly for his literary nonsense  in the 19th Century.  As a form of folk verse its origins may be much older. Gershon Legman compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene to which literary heavy weights Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw concurred. Lear described the clean limerick as a “periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity”.

The connection between the limerick and the Irish County of the same name are satisfactorily obscure but may derive from an earlier form of a nonsense verse parlor game that traditionally included a refrain that included “Will [or won’t] you come (up) to Limerick?”  But perhaps it was simply because a little Old Sod poteen, loosened the tongue and inhibitions for ribald play.

The most famous limerick of all was considered so obscene that it seldom saw print, although it was recited in many a bar room.

There was a young man from Nantucket

Whose dick was so long he could suck it.

    He said with a grin

    As he wiped off his chin,

“If my ear was a cunt I would fuck it.

 

                                        Edward Lear, 1866.

Despite his opinion, that limericks were generally obscene, the ones Edward Lear wrote and published in his 1875 Book of Nonsense did not offend Victorian morality.  But these two seem to include a sly double entendre.

There was an Old Man who said, “Hush!

I perceive a young bird in this bush!

When they said, “Is it small?”

He replied, “Not at all!

It is four times as big as the bush!”

 

—Edward Lear

 

There was a Young Lady of Dorking,

Who bought a large bonnet for walking;

But its colour and size,

So bedazzled her eyes,

That she very soon went back to Dorking.

 

—Edward Lear

One from America’s comic poet.

Here is a more modern example of the old fashion filthy absolutely guaranteed to offend.

The lass I brought home was a prize,

With an alluring set of bright eyes,

Her breasts, so well kept,

Were what I’d expect,

But her penis was quite a surprise!

Limericks are frequently used as political satire—usually scurrilous and—you should pardon the expression—below the belt employed by partisans of the Right and the Left with equal zest.

The President’s loud protestation

On his fall to his intern’s temptation:

“This affair is still moral

As long as it’s oral

Straight screwing I save for the nation.

 

 

A president famed for his spite*

Tweeted “I am outstandingly bright.

I’d be perfectly able

To muck out any stable

Because I am a genius at shite!

 

―Jim McLeod

 

Note: The limerick above won the fifth annual Bring your Limericks to Limerick contest, sponsored by the Limerick Writers’ Centre. We found the name of the winning limerick writer ironic, since Trump’s mother was a MacLeod from Scotland’s Outer Hebrides!

 

Dear Donald, when out on the stump

Please don’t lunge at our flag and then hump.

Such an act’s unbecoming

And vulgar — mind-numbing.

What’s your next flag-act? Taking a dump?

 

You get the idea.  Your efforts welcome in the [edited] comments.