Palestine! You call to me with whispers of pain.
You speak of lost poets, children who cry for lost parents, lost teachers
lost childhoods, dreams torn from their roots, mangled in a desert gone dry.
In this place, water is poisoned, air putrid from the blood belly of war
There is no escape, only sleep ravished by nightmares or death
I want to hear your poetry
and tell you mine.
I want to look into your eyes and see myself in you.
Down! Down beneath the graves I hear your cries
Muffled in a shroud of deception. You don’t exist.
Israel, you are no longer my Israel.
You punish those you call Arabs, dirty Arabs.
Sad peoples of Palestine spit on and defiled, kept behind a wall.
Oh ghetto of Israel I ache for the reviled proud Palestinians, our brothers and sisters.
But most of all I ache for you, for you know not what you do.
This beautiful poem is a cry from one who doesn’t care much for vikings.
The Israelis generally, who are tightly tied emotionally with their country’s military — and the USA’s military-industrial-Congressional-university complex and system of military imperialism — are todays Vikings: vicious, blood-thirsty, rapacious, and entirely willing to engage in the most violent carnage as a matter of course, as a cultural norm, without qualm. And even without reasonable purpose. Horror for its own sake.
One aspect of all this is that those who are emotionally allied with Israel and with the USA (and I still love the USA, for all its faults) are induced to overlook or to excuse or even to celebrate the carnage (perhaps even treating it as necessary rather than as a blood-thirsty hobby) as a way of avoiding the “cognitive dissonance” (an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously) (wikipedia) which would arise within them if they were simultaneously aware of their own peaceable and humane impulses and their country’s (or their country’s military’s) rapacious policies, philosophies, and practices. If this inducement succeeds, we become part of the “collateral damage” of our out-of-control military.
“Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.”
I ache for the reviled proud Palestinians
me too lillian. i have to push that ache out of my mind sometimes just to keep moving forward in my determination to make a better world. i keep visualizing the eventual peace. i remember this is a temporary space in time. but i cry about it and let myself feel the pain inside me sometimes because if i didn’t release it i would go crazy maybe.
Palestine! You call to me with whispers of pain.
tears again.