They say there is no such thing as the voiceless,
Only the deliberately silenced.
They say let Palestine speak for herself,
In the only language of her defiance.
They say we are not numbers,
But souls fighting for justice.
Their dead are not a tool,
To awaken the empathy of the heartless.
Because your Facebook statuses mean nothing,
But are only a snippet of shared sorrow.
We mourn their dead over Twitter,
But forget about them tomorrow.
And how do they tell the world,
That their very survival is a battle.
Fragile and uncertain like their borders,
No, they are not ‘collateral’.
They say we are not terrorists,
Just people with unlived fantasies.
And their struggle to show us they’re human,
Is itself their greatest tragedy.
They say we only want peace,
Let us breathe freely in our homeland.
They long to see light other than explosions,
Someone to take their dying hand.
We ask for measured responses and balance,
Step away from anything political.
Give us some UN resolutions,
Let’s keep it neutral and uncritical.
They say the only balance they see,
Is the father who balanced his son on his knee.
Who sang and read to him under the occupied skies,
Now fragments of forbidden dreams.
They say how can we balance your silence,
Against the sound of bombs in our land?
Strange that another person’s humanity,
Is sometimes so hard to understand.
Their story becomes our statistic,
Our dehumanisation of the already dehumanised.
Give us a list of your dead in word limits,
But let’s be sure not to politicise.
But today…
Today, I wish I could weep over the bodies of Palestine’s lost children,
Cross over the checkpoints and apartheid walls,
Run to the corners of every refugee camp
And scream ‘we are with you, we stand tall.’
Today I don’t need UN resolutions,
Just my eyes, my heart and my soul
No I don’t need statistics,
To count up the lifeless as a ‘death toll.’
Today I wish my words could end this,
Freedom from the shackles of occupation,
Embrace the young boy beaten by soldiers,
Disfigured like the maps of his nation.
Today I wish I could hold the hand of every Palestinian mother,
Tell her this is not forever
Some day her children won’t be humiliated,
In refusing to side with the oppressor.
Today I wish I could stand with the children of Palestine,
With a rock in one hand, raising a flag as resisting heroes
Today I wish I could fill the grey skies,
With all the colours of the rainbow.
Today if my words could end this,
I would repeat them like the holy verses of the Quran.
I would shout them from every building roof still intact,
I would recite them like the daily Azan.
But today I know my words can’t end this,
I only scream and pray to the divine,
Let Palestine speak and let the children tell their tale,
Because this is their story, not mine.
NOTE: The writer wrote this poem on the situation of Palestine while showing how the ‘human’ element is often lost in reporting.
