Lisa Suhair Majaj

Lisa Suhair Majaj (born 1960) is a Palestinian-American poet and scholar.

Quotes

• My writing process is generally a bit haphazard. I carry notebooks around to capture ideas, observations, phrases, images, chunks of freewriting. I shift to the computer to do more substantive writing and work on craft issues. I always generate multiple drafts of pieces (keeping all drafts in a separate folder), and often experiment with form in different versions to see what fits the text best.
  • Interview with LitHub

• I find inspiration in anything that sparks attention and emotion and associations—an object, a news article, a natural scene, a sound, an odor. Going for walks sharpens my awareness as well as freeing my mind to wander. I think losing my parents so early, and keeping so many mementos from them around me in my daily life, helped shape my understanding of how meaning is embedded in the simplest of things. I use potholders my mother crocheted, keep my dad’s paperweight on my desk, and think of them daily.
  • Interview with LitHub

Geographies of Light (2009)

Fragments from the poetry collection

• Now we walk out into the tunnel of days
  and a million memories rustle

• till the moon rises,
  the night opens,
  and all the stars shine out.

• The sun will rise again tomorrow,
  vigilant and weary as hope.

• May we all fit together like this: trees, birds, sky,
  people, separate elements in a living portrait,
  outlines smoothed by the forgiving wash
  of lingering light. Whatever the skins we live in,
  the names we choose, the gods we claim or disavow,
  may we be like grains of sand on the beach at night:
  a hundred million separate particles
  creating a single expanse on which to lie back
  and study the stars. And may we remember the generosity
  of light: how it travels through unimaginable darkness,
  age after age, to light our small human night.

• Bless poetry books that cross oceans
  in battered envelopes,
  bearing small flames of words.

• hopes
  for peace: hand clasped in hand
  firmer than fist on a gun
  or club, hand raised in greeting
  stronger than hand raised for violence

• Today his words surround me
  with the quiet intensity of growing things,
  roots planted a long time ago
  lacing the distances of my heart.

• See how we save even the broken bits of pottery,
  fitting fragments together
  along jagged lines to remember you

• Did my parents know
  that what they planted,
  roots against the drought,
  would survive?

• consider the infinite fragility of an infant's skull,
  how the bones lie soft and open
  only time knitting them shut

• consider a delicate porcelain bowl
  how it crushes under a single blow-
  in one moment whole years disappear

• The distance between one breath and another
  is like the miles starlight travels to reach
  my dreams.

• so I hoard memories
  sort them for seeds to plant
  pray they root

• Once she could have held anything steady
  and safe: a glass of tea, her brother's baby.
  Now her hands shake at the weight of a fork.

• ground resilient beneath our feet, sky
  glimmering
  between branches of trees older than any of us.

• She took her slice of life
  then gave without measuring
  or counting

• what's left but
  shards of memory
  smoothed and hoarded,
  shrapnel griefs,
  a few regrets?

• Who knew the past would follow us so far,
  years collapsing like an ancient accordion,
  scraps of memory tucked like torn photographs
  into the sockets of our eyes?

• Remember the splintered staccato
  of bullets against rock, the way dust rose
  in the stunned aftershock of silence?

• We learned to let our faces hide
  our selves, to speak our story in a private
  tongue, the past a shadow in our bones.

• No matter how far you've come, remember:
  the starting line is always closer than you think.

• soon syllables will fall from her lips
  the first rain

• how a word transforms us
  seedling taking delicate hold
  or a weed choking the tender plants
  news enters us and puts down roots

• These words are the weight
  cupped in our palms:
  the small broken note of freedom.

• Part of it hides behind the headlines
  where this shard of the story will never be told.

Quotes about Lisa Suhair Majaj

• Lisa Suhair Majaj has one of the most necessary voices writing in the world today. Her exquisite poems sustain and hearten us, lift us out of the morass of deception and delusion. Her images and scenes offer up clean, brave truth. Here is the saving grace of honesty, dignity, and deep compassion. Here is a keen, elegant eye and a care wider than any single horizon.
  • Naomi Shihab Nye