By Fady Joudah
The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows,
They know what they love, milk in the grain.
When it happens, there will be no time to look for anyone.
Husband, children, nine brothers and sisters.
You will drop your sugarcane-stick-beating of plastic bucket,
Stop shouting at birds and run.
They will load you in trucks and herd you for a hundred miles.
Old men will teach you trade with soldiers at checkpoints.
You will give them your spoon, blanket and beans,
They’ll let you keep your life. And if you jump off the truck,
The army jeep trailing it will run you over.
Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land.
Later, you will stand in distribution lines and won’t receive enough to eat.
Your mother will weave you new underwear from flour sacks.
And they’ll give you plastic tents, cooking pots,
Vaccine cards, white pills, and wool blankets.
And you will keep your cool.
Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them.
Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.
Fady Joudah, “Scarecrow” from The Earth in the Attic. Copyright © 2008 by Fady Joudah. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
Source: The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008)
Poet Bio
More By This Poet
Non-terminal
No shardswhere one is bound to no place in the first place
all shardswe were clear on that from the beginning
Absence is always sudden to hear your voiceonce more more
echo than shrapnel qualia of the forbidden
transforms itself into wounds regeneratesa hydra...
Mimesis
My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go...
More Poems about Social Commentaries
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
Poem with Human Intelligence
This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...