I teach​ poetry to my students at university.

            I tell them all about

                        Eliot’s objective correlative

                        Keats’s negative capability

                        Coleridge’s organic unity

            I make sure they understand

                        rhyme, rhythm, prosody

                        alliteration, allusion, apostrophe

                        metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche

                        imagery, symbolism, hyperbole

                        enjambment, anaphora, blah blah blah

            I teach them 

                        all that I’ve been taught

                        by my poetry professors

            and they seem happy!

I teach​ poetry to my students
but      

what I don’t teach them is that

none of this stuff makes great poets
or real poetry!

that to become a poet

you need to have had your home
            stolen from you

            your dreams confiscated,

            your hopes held hostage

you need to have heard

            the cacophony of the Merkava

            the bellowing of the bulldozer

to have appreciated the irony
            when your ancestral olive trees
            became charcoal
you need to have heard

            the onomatopoeia

                        in the roar of the rocket
                        in the bomb’s boom
                        to have spotted the alliteration in

                        “we will waste you in the womb!”

To write poetry
you need to have seen
            your brother blown to pieces

you need to have spotted
            your sister’s curly hair
            under a mountain of rubble
            to have removed her teddy bear
            from her loosening embrace

            to have wiped blood clots
            off her face

you need to have seen
            tearless mothers
            identifying their sons

            one after another
            in mass graves

            fathers

            rocking their pale princesses to sleep

                        fast, sound, deep!

you need to have known

            what it feels like

            to write your name
            on your small limbs

            so they may identify you

            when you become unidentifiable
you need to have learned

            how to swallow
            the sight of your best friend’s
            charred body
            to get used to the word “gone”

                           one
                                       by
                                                one.

To be a poet
you need to have seen this
            known this
                        felt this
with every cell in your body
and that is ​why
                         Palestine

has so many great poets.

Forgive me, my students!

I have lied
                and lied
                             and I am ashamed of myself.