Lisa Suhair Majaj
Poetry
Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian-American, is the author of Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press Poetry Prize winner), and poems and essays in many international publications. Her writing has been used in various venues from art exhibits to political protests. Her poems were displayed as part of the exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East (Harn Museum of Art, 2016). Her work has been translated into Arabic, Greek, and other languages. She has also published children’s books and literary criticism, and has co-edited three volumes of essays on international women writers. She lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.
True Lies
My childhood was uneventful,
and happy. My father raised wild goats
in a small mountain village adrift
with the odor of thyme. My mother
baked bread on stones, wove blankets
of goat hair, coaxed jam out of cactus fruit.
Each morning I rose before dawn
for the day’s trek to water, balancing a jug
on my head down the long steep path.
In the winter we roasted chestnuts
at the family hearth, told tall tales
to entertain each other through the long
dark nights. This was one of them.
Listen: