Searching for a Palestinian Necropastoral (Eve)
A search for origins along an American river and a mother's breath — Abraham rewrites the pastoral as a Palestinian form, where to arrive at a landscape is to have a past to run from.
& I found it in that half -liminal light, divined into fractal’s endless—before split & risen, before splay & tempt, before
womblessness became an american sadness & I found it in my mother’s breath, her reek of rivers still enough to pass as reflection
(excerpt)
About this poem
“Searching for a Palestinian Necropastoral (Eve)” was published as Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets on 1 July 2021. Abraham — author of Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) and the chapbook al youm: for yesterday & her inherited traumas (The Atlas Review, 2017) — takes the pastoral, poetry’s oldest landscape of innocence, and asks what it can hold for a Palestinian in America: an origin found not in the light on the water but in a mother’s breath, “her reek of rivers.”