On the “travel” of poetry and Omar Sakr’s “Algo in the Genocide”

Axel-Nathaniel Rose

Omar Sakr’s “Algo in the Genocide” is printed on the back of the shirts of Readers and Writers Against the Genocide (‘RWAG’), a collective protesting Australia’s ongoing ties to Israel’s government and military. It is a listing poem, structured around that which is forbidden from public discourse about the genocide—through either social media content filters or through censorship under the name of “respectability”. Through brutal repetition and omission, it demonstrates how the algorithmic policing of language undermines the humanity of Palestinians. It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury”, which reads now like an inverted prophecy: “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” (2).

When I first saw it, I did not realise it is among the first three shirts produced by RWAG featuring words from acclaimed Australian poets: Sakr, Sara M. Saleh (“Footnotes for Gaza”), and Evelyn Araluen (“One day the books will count the dead”). RWAG followed this first series with shirts featuring the work of poets living through the siege on Gaza: Mahmoud Alshaer, Nour Abdel Latif, Batool Abu Akleen, and Dr. Ezzideen Shehab.

These shirts are beautiful in intent and execution alike, and I was struck by the thought that I have rarely seen poetry worn at protests. Poetry is a staple of protests: “When _________ are under attack? What do we do? Stand up; fight back!” and “Ho-hey, hey-ho, _________ has got to go” are common rhythms in protests and marches, but these are rarely worn on protestors’ bodies.

In Mike Chasar’s 2020 Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram, he argues that “poetry travels more easily than any other art” (11). From commonplace books to Hallmark cards, to radio poetry, to a surprising oeuvre of crime shows structured around literary-minded criminals, poetry moves through cultures. Chasar’s argument follows how new technologies have been normalised by quickly adapting them for the dissemination of poetry. As something of a lockdown project, I watched the rise of TikTok in the anglosphere, waiting for the first TikTok poets to appear, waiting to see how they conformed to and differed from the conventions of YouTube performance poetry and Instapoetry.

Poetry travels—perhaps most often because of rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme work as mnemonics, and thus are often used in education; they are sometimes beautiful; they are sometimes playful; and they are usually adaptable, meaning people can modify the words of a song or poem to suit their context, and the text will remain recognisable as long as the rhythm and rhyme are maintained. Thus, the ever-growing verses of the poem, “boss makes a dollar, I make a dime”; thus, the many iterations of a limerick that begins “there once was a man from Nantucket”, variable in their rudeness but not their rhythm. Poetry lives in everyday life—it is not always impressive, and it is not always “good”, whatever that may mean in any given context, but it is always there. When the Blue Mountains “V-Set’” trains were retired in January 2026, after 50 years of use, I wondered if the poems pasted on their walls in orange vinyl would be retired too:

Cover your cough or sneeze, please

It may not be intended, but people are offended

Taking up all the space is a disgrace

These are laughable lines, but they are memorable. They speak, with their clunky perfect rhymes, to how attention-grabbing rhyme and rhythm (or the lack thereof) can be. These are a world apart from the poems gifted to RWAG, but they too travel (unusually literally).

Mainstream Australian publishers stopped investing in poetry long ago, and while Australia’s small presses (University of Queensland Press, Five Islands Press, Puncher and Wattman, Calanthe, Giramondo…) have continued to develop, publish, and promote Australian poetry, poetry remains unsung in much of Australia’s public literary life. Despite this, poetry lives: it travels. Organisations form and sustain it: The Bankstown Poetry Slam, Red Room Poetry, Sweatshop Western Sydney, the Australian Poetry Board of Directors. Much has been written on the fragmentary and self-contained nature of many of these poetic ventures; how much do they feed each other? How unified is their mission?

Seeing Omar Sakr’s words clinging to the bodies of hundreds of people from protest to protest, read by thousands in person, read by millions from their screens, read aloud to one another, hearing them breaking in my own throat as I struggle to share them with a friend who cannot make sense of white text on a black background, I see how poetry travels. I spot the poem out of the corner of my eye at a grocery store, and I think of the missing words. I think of Gaza. I think of Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die”, a poem written twelve years before his death in an airstrike on Palestine, now translated into dozens of languages by people calling out in their own languages to spread Alareer’s own—to let his words travel.

Chasar says,

That poetry travels so easily is one of its chief features and abiding strengths. If we cannot keep up with it, that is not poetry’s fault—it is ours. But we stand only to gain by trying to follow it beyond the book, by tracking where it goes, and how, and by learning even more about what it helps to make happen (24).

Poetry travels for Gaza, living and ferocious. As Lorde says, “poetry is not a luxury […] It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (2). Poetry moves in harmony with action; perhaps, in an economy of attention, it is action in itself. Perhaps it is the vibrant demand to focus—to not allow “genocide” to go unspoken.

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Works Cited

Buckley, Penry. “One last ride on the V-set: NSW train fans farewell ‘old but plush’ steel rattlers in style.” The Guardian, 30^th January 2026, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/30/v-set-trains-nsw-last-ride-farewell. Accessed 15^th February 2026.

Chasar, Mike. Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram. Columbia University Press, 2020.

If I Must Die (webpage), available at: https://ifimustdie.net/. Accessed 15^th February 2026.

Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Penguin Classics, 2018, pp. 1-5.

Readers and Writers Against the Genocide [@readerswritersagainstgenocide], Instagram, available at: https://www.instagram.com/readerswritersagainstgenocide/. Accessed 15^th February 2026.

Readers and Writers Against the Genocide (webpage), available at: https://rwag.dasautomat.com/. Accessed 15^th February 2026.

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