Poem of the Week

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real

Aleksandar Hemon

That which doesn’t have to be named

just keeps being until it’s all undone.

Beyond all that, the world is negotiable

and cool, with readjusted coloring,

invisible pain—an ad for a harmless hell.

See the Styrofoam moon in a painted sky,

casting no light, just matted reflections,

the stars lurking through the tin-sky holes,

designed in a void that has never moved.

But just below, the passing birds, notches

in the night, with news of the cursed tribe

whose stories have no end or beginning,

who never lived but must now all be killed.

Cities razed, boats sunk, children drowned,

kindle wood carved from ancient olive trees,

shrapnel-shredded bodies in tall heaps.

The birds sing in mourning for the absent

gone unburied, never, nowhere to be found,

those who were there or here not so long ago,

asking us: Your name? Where do you come from?

Why are you with us when the others are dead?

The Yale Review · “If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real” by Aleksandar Hemon

How did this poem begin for you?

I think the poem began for me upon reading news that Israel cut down ancient olive trees in occupied Palestine. That, again, activated the perennial question: What can poetry, literature, art do in the face of genocide, or in the face of the perpetual production of unreality as a means of genocidal denial and obfuscation?

As for the formal realization, I can’t quite remember all the decisions, as they happened in a flow, not unlike skiing downhill at great speed. But I’m pretty sure that I eventually rearranged an early version into terzinas, which in turn demanded different line breaks and beats.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of a number of books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel The World and All That It Holds. He also writes screenplays, produces music (as Cielo Hemon), and teaches at Princeton University.