For ‘I love you’, say Free Palestine

Sara M. Saleh’s poem Say Free Palestine, described as a meditation after Sean Bonney, pays homage to the English left-wing radical poet known for his poem ACAB: A Nursery Rhyme, which begins with the line: "for I love you" say fuck the police.

March 21, 2025, marks the 65th anniversary of the tragic Sharpeville massacre—a day in 1960 when police fired 1,344 rounds without warning into a peaceful crowd, including children, protesting South Africa’s apartheid pass laws. At least 91 people were killed, and at least 238 were injured. Fuck the police.

Saleh has called for drawing attention to this date in solidarity with South Africa at a time of intensified imperial duress—partly sanctioned by the U.S. in response to South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which accuses Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people. Free Palestine.

Progressive International (PI), for whom Saleh contributed poetry to a limited-edition fundraising artwork, has stood alongside South Africa in its ICJ case and, most recently, against the U.S. cancellation of USAID funding. Saleh’s contribution to PI is a poetic call for Palestinian liberation, embedded within a graphic of broken chains by Mothanna Hussein, a Jordan-based artist and co-founder of the Free Palestine Project. Free Palestine.

March 21 is also the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, established in 1965 as a landmark step by the United Nations General Assembly toward eradicating racism. No one is free until we are all free.

Sara M. Saleh is an award-winning writer, human rights lawyer, and racial justice organizer. The daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, she lives on Bidjigal land (Sydney, Australia) and is committed to uplifting youth and building communities of resistance rooted in the interconnected struggles for Indigenous self-determination.

In keeping with this commitment to liberation and to highlight the fundraising series of editions inspired by Indigenous solidarity with Palestine, we republish a poem from Sara M. Saleh’s award-winning poetry collection, The Flirtation of Girls (UQP, 2023). This piece speaks to colonization and displacement, engaging with Sun of Consciousness and other works by Édouard Glissant.

Punctuation as Organised Violence 

1. Thirty years ago, my folks migrated to a city half dipped in ocean. To this day, they are sepia-faced and prayer-shaped, coal soot and cedar hills still rolling underneath their fingernails.
   
   
2. Arab-Australian 
   Arab Australian
   ArabAustralian
   
   This arbiter of gods. This wretched frontier: duality or hybridity?
3. The Arabic language does not have hyphens, because the breaking of something from the inside is not allowed or we continue on as if it is not broken.
   We ration bags of za’atar and green almonds and joke in our parents’ accents. In this place, we have learned to leaven like dough.
   
   
4. Colony wants to uproot the cedar from our nails. To be citizen is gauze negotiating with festering exit wound.

1. Father says. maybe it does not. always. have to be. a choice. between the smell of bread. or the smell of bullets.
   
   
2. The officer who watched the burning cities on my father’s shoulders said, ‘This land is for the living. For the free.’ And stamped the papers. ‘Welcome. Welcome.’ Each welcome a blister. A pledge to an elusive ‘Australian future’.
   
   
3. Welcome. To back-beating labour. To being taxed out of beloved, grey-lipped houses, for the motorway and a multiplex centre. To brazen high-rises and rooftop gardens and high ceilings with delicate emerald trimmings. To where they constantly move salvation beyond our reach.
   
   
4. Application. Visa. Policy. Border. Fence. Ceremony. Father didn’t know then, are all elements of fiction, too. 
   
   

1. My folks grew me on a land thick with eucalyptus, moss, metropole, genocide Arab, Australian, Other, Amen
   
   My first words stumbled out,
   shreds of language on a clumsy tongue, clenched in-between the aches of
   this suspect body
   our lands, our skies, our lines
   heirlooms
   cannot be fractured,
   or curated so quietly
   in your museums and galleries
   Does a comma slow the chaos, or expand it?
   
   
2. Arab,
   Australian,
   Other
   
   In a drop-down list,
   who I am does not exist in English, violence
   enacted by a box,
   these algorithms
   of absence 
   
   

1. Every day, Mama and Baba plant the alphabet at first light. Their citrus-skinned bodies are whole canons. Our lashes licking the sun, we make our way into the golden harvest.
   
   
2. Mama and Baba, they’re so thin now. The words for what is killing us also thinning.
   
   
3. Apostrophe: to contract or to subdue; to possess
   
   
4. Sundays at Arabic school, we chewed mastic-flavoured gum loudly and rolled our eyes at Mr Hamza’s conjugations. I must have missed the (grammar) lesson then: That which you think you possess first possesses you.
    

1. Australia
   Largest exports: metals, minerals, grains
   Largest imports: m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶r̶y̶, p̶r̶e̶c̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶t̶a̶l̶s̶, p̶l̶a̶s̶t̶i̶c̶s̶, human beings
   (Colony honors itself with statues and streets and medals and prefers we don’t ask whose land we are on and who builds everything around here.)
   
   
2. The Migration Act (people are footnotes).
   
   
3. Colony is a chalk outline.
   
   We are up to our necks in fuel and muted prayers and neat piles of grief. Let us swing baseball bats instead of lighting more candles. I know it is not convenient (when will it be?)
   
   
4. Silence in a place is the same as not existing (and they expect us to not exist).
   
   
5. My folks did not march at protests and chant slogans and they never explained preferential voting. They lined up at the phone booth for hours as the promised rains came, cradling 50¢ coins and two screaming toddlers waiting for a chance to call home. They worked dishwashing and cleaning shifts to scrape enough for my medical bills and one book from the Scholastic sheet (and what is more revolutionary?)

Invasion /
Terra Nullius /
White Australia /
Immigration /
English /
Multiculturalism /
Democracy /
Anti-Terror laws, over 82 and counting / Countering Violent Extremism / Afghanistan /
Iraq / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

1. My people are not recognised in national legislation that protects from Racial Discrimination.
   
   Why do these Laws matter more than we do?
   (Do we matter at all?)
   What of these holy texts lodged deep in the dredges of country?
   
   
2. How long must we live in a world that only offers dust in our eyes and is there such a thing as courtesy in a War we never asked for?
   
   
3. I don’t want a world where we are Almost Beautiful.
   
   
4. Is Death still any less Death if it is taking its time?
   

To the edition direct here. 

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Sara M. Saleh’s words have been published widely in English and Arabic. While her literary achievements transcend medium, genre and geography, she is most celebrated for co-editing the critically acclaimed anthology, Arab, Australian, Other (Picador, 2019) and for historic wins of both the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2021) and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize (2020). Her books The Flirtation Of Girls (UQP, 2023) and Songs For The Dead And The Living (Affirm Press, 2023) have received multiple shortlists and prizes.

Mothanna Hussein is an artist and designer active in the creative community of Amman, Jordan. With Saaed Abu-Jaber, Hussein is co-founder of the widely respected Radio alHara, a Palestinian digital radio station and Turbo, a design studio with international clients. The Free Palestine Project is a curated archive of free posters submitted by designers from around the globe in solidarity with Palestine, initiated with Hadi Alaeddin as the design duo known as Warsheh.