I have more respect
For the man who will point the gun between my eyes
For the man who pulls the grenade
For the man who blows this body into shattered, unidentifiable pieces
Than the man who plots in his villa in Doha
Cocktail hour by the swimming pool
Kanafani in Beirut, lazing among artists
Who speak of resistance
As though it weren't
Stealing the life spark
From women and children across this cursed continent.
I have more respect for he who pulls the trigger
Than he who numbs the humanity of his readers in the pages of newspapers
That bloodily spill onto the internet;
Neither for the journalist who reasons with death
Or calls for a river of revenge
Nor for the plotters and planners who map our endings with silver ballpoint pens,
And iPhone 15s brimming with emails;
Who can bless these small men with anything but the forever kind of hatred?
They called him 'a commando who never fired a gun,
Whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages'
And they painted his beautiful brown eyes all across Lebanon and Syria and Iraq.
Nobody spoke of the families robbed of fathers, mothers, children, brothers, sisters.
Twenty-six souls
Stolen from their families
Because a poet wanted to resist
650 kilometres from where
You were crushed like insignificant ants.
And history, rewritten by blood
Remembers the poet
Not the children
Nor their names
Nor the seventeen pilgrims
Who came in peace
And left in parts.
How-
I ask you how-
Do you begin
To tell the truth, for the sake of truth,
When not even the sounds of grief can silence
Those who dance on our graves?
No comments:
Post a Comment