Qahir by Jannie Edwards
There is no English equivalent for qahir قهر,
the young Palestinian poet told me.
Putting anger alongside qahir,
she said, is like comparing a bonfire
to an underground coal-seam fire smoldering
for decades in the labyrinths of an abandoned mine.
Qahir, she said, is fuelled by a century of injustice,
displacement, dehumanization and suffering so that
it stifles your breath, weighs down your heart,
takes over your dreams, sifts into your cells
and alters your genes to move through generations.
**
My meditation teacher says
that when anger flares,
we should be like a log, be like a log
until we can breathe stillness
and equilibrium back into balance.
But I argue,
like a log, I am cut from a living tree.
I am ready to burn.
April 2024 Creative Corner prompt response, published with the author's permission. Copyright © 2024 poem by Jannie Edwards. Sign up for our newsletter for a chance to be featured on our blog, Pensieri.
An immigrant to Canada, Jannie Edwards is a writer, editor, teacher, artistic collaborator, and grandmother who writes from her chosen city of Edmonton, on Treaty 6 and Métis Region 4 territory. She has published three collections of poetry: Falling Blues, Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems, and The Possibilities of Thirst. She has collaborated on mentorships and multidisciplinary artistic projects that include videopoems (Engrams and adrift), theatrical adaptations of her Blood Opera, and several community art projects that realized poems sandblasted into sidewalks on the High Level Bridge and city neighbourhoods. She is an emeritus of MacEwan University.