Like many in his generation of Palestinian cultural producers, the Gazan writer Muin Bseiso played many roles. As a poet, journalist, playwright, critic, and essayist, Bseiso persistently fought to preserve and transmit Palestinian history and experience, stitching Palestine into the fabric of global Third World anticolonial struggles. His poetry is therefore simultaneously nationalist and internationalist: the 1965 collection Filastin fi al-Qalb (Palestine at Heart), for example, frequently invokes “my homeland” (ya watani) and “my people” (ya shaʿbi), but it also refers to other struggles against racial and colonial oppression, from the Algerian war of liberation (in the poem “Ring, Bells of the Commune”), to protests over the 1958 death sentence for Jimmy Wilson in Alabama (in “Song for an American Negro”), and from the July 14 revolution in Iraq (the ambivalent ode “Gunpowder Forearms”) to the 1964 popular liberation of imprisoned Iraqi Communist Party members from torture and death at Nugrat al-Salman prison (in “Iraq’s Third River”). This paper identifies a “poetics of suspension” at the heart of Bseiso’s poetry in Filastin fi al-Qalb, particularly in the poems “Ode to Barbed Wire” (Qasidah ila al-Aslak al-Shaʾikah) and “The Sailor Returning from Occupied Shores” (al-Bahhar al-ʿAʾid min al-Shatʾan al-Muhtallah), among others in the collection. This poetics of suspension emerges, I argue, in Bseiso’s figurative use of the Arabic conditional particles law and la. The poetic speaker introduces a series of conditional phrases beginning with “if” (law) yet refuses to close out the grammatical structure with the requisite “then” (la-) until the very final lines of the poem, leaving the reader hanging in the balance. Bseiso uses Arabic grammar, in other words, to give form, in language, to the state of suspension structuring Palestinian experiences of occupation, exile, displacement, siege, and destruction both material and epistemic. At the same time, “suspension” also describes the place Bseiso accords to Palestinian nationalism within his commitment to Third World internationalism: as his poetic speakers witness and celebrate liberation struggles around the world, they also make creative use of Christological imagery and surprising, surrealist noun-adjective juxtapositions to elaborate a specifically Palestinian grammar of freedom, always linked to the invoked watan and shaʿb. Rather than apply methodologies or theories of reading to Bseiso’s work, then, I deduce an epistemology—a mode of knowing—from the poetry itself.