Image: Echoing Steps by Esmee van Zeeventer (from issue 63.2, Spring 2025).
Hello beautiful reader! As we move towards the colder months, I have been returning to our Winter 2025 issue, PRISM 63.1 SPELLS (sold-out). This was a very special issue for me, as the first issue I worked on as Poetry Editor. This poem, “Where you are not permitted to spread you must ascend” by Clare Bayard, is one of the most powerful pieces I’ve come across during my time at PRISM. It is a poem of witness: it speaks to a reality often erased. I hope it hits you as hard as it hit me.
With warmth & solidarity,
Ayda Niknami, Poetry Editor
Where you are not permitted to spread you must ascend
by Clare Bayard
In Ramallah my body became a poppy,
a red song echoing these hills I was not born to.
Pale stone stipples hills everyone knows are beautiful.
There are so many ways to pray.
In Dheisheh refugee camp, teen artists
lounging on a rooftop told me of waterless
months, how the soldiers turn their rooftop raintanks
into sieves with casual bullets. They spoke of the ache
To taste the sea near their grandparents’ emptied
villages that my passport allows
me but never them
to visit. They say We need a new way.
Children showed me Handalas drawn on concrete cubes
where refugee families build up, up, nowhere to go but up.
Each new generation rises on a new floor.
Concrete incarnates West Bank futures.
At the march to the Wall cutting Bi’lin’s groves, every shot
went wide beyond the edges of my body. Boys cupped stones
like birds flung unready into smeary air.
Girls advanced hand in hand into the teargas veil.
I stumble behind them towards what none of us
can still imagine: an end to the endless wars.
Later I’m invited to long tables of spiced sweets,
honeyed tea pressed in my crackling white hands.
Leila said if she could go back to Haifa,
she would sleep under an orange tree.
Renewed & unkeyed, I didn’t cry until
the Taba border crossing. As my leaving
was inscribed, I looked back at the weak
guns astride the hillside.
The future arrives
unevenly. Risk it.
Where you are not permitted to spread you must ascend quotes Leila Khaled as interviewed by Marta Vidal in the New Internationalist, July 2023.
The title refers to the Israeli control of housing for Palestinian families living in Dheisheh camp and across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israel refuses most construction permits and regularly demolishes homes. Dheisheh was built in 1949 as temporary shelter for Palestinian refugees from 44 villages who were ethnically cleansed in the Nakba.