The Killing Fields Lament for Palestine
Tonight; as the Mother of Palestinian children, someone who has carried this bloodline through my womb… my heart is bleeding from the pain and terror being carried out in the Motherland.
Through these intermingled cells, I feel the scream of every parent holding up the bodies of their dead children. (Not child, children)
Holding them up towards heaven. Shaking their limp lifeless bodies, as though trying to get God’s attention.
Running in circles, yelling out to into the void.
This strange, desperate, ritual dance,
mirrors the chaos.
Unable to grasp their unnatural new reality
as they see the broken bodies…
Strewn across The killing fields.
Trying to make sense of this new shape.
This new shape, that doesn’t fit.
A family of 4 becomes a family of 3, becomes a family of two.
In an afternoon.
Punishment.
No nourishment…
to sustain them.
No shoulder to cry on.
No home to receive visitors in.
No bed to rest to rest on.
No earth to hold them.
Only perpetual, unending horror scrolled out before them.
My body echoes with the collective keen
The Keen of Mothers who lost the dream
To hug their babies and live free.
Just like you and me.
Mothers not given the decency
of committing their child’s bodies
to the ground.
Because there is nothing sacred, in what the West has deemed..
Profane
There is no morality in the beliefs and ideologies
…that have made us insane.
Only hypocrisy to the extreme.
Hypocrisy that justifies punishment.
The foot of the boot, pressed into the pavement.
On our bodies, they relieve themselves of their pain.
One way ticket on a one way train.
There is a weeping.
A weeping that springs from the knowing.
That death comes with relief.
The death of their child = grief + relief.
In this fucked up world, there is a deep exhale
that the deity of death has visited so soon. .
Their child is the lucky one. Not a chosen one. But a rescued one. A blessed one.
Taken early from the furnace of this white phosphorus hell.
This is a relief no parent should feel..
The relief of the kill.
Their child’s death brings solace
To them.
and apparently
to the enemy.
Because why else would we turn a school, a hospital, a road, into a killing field?
If not to appease
The enemy.
The nightmare is over.
The incessant trauma has ended.
Knees to the ground. Hands clasped in prayer.
“Thank you God for taking them now.”
Before the next blow, or the next blow
This is a love only a parent can know.
To know in our bones that the horror of day, is so much worse than the long, black stretch of night.
Thank God this happened in the night.
Under the cover of the Moon and Stars .
So the images of blood, and bones, limbs, and toes,
won’t be seared into their memory
Not the same way in the light it would be.
No, It’s appropriate that the ending detonated under the cover of night.
Thank God this is happened through dampened sight.
-
Through the night there is but moments of sleep.
then these childless parents will wake without reason to breathe.
The emptiness filled with commotion.
First Shock, then more & More adrenaline.
Pile on brutality and desperation.
All this happens ad infinitum.
The few drops of water they take in
quickly empties from their eyes.
The disorientation of starvation and dehydration:
Are welcome as they cry.
Welcome to hell on earth. Brought to you by who?
By Man’s need for exclusivity.
For dominance and superiority.
Through horror produced by scarcity.
This is not a world for mothers.
This is a world where brother kills brother.
A world where justification omits justice.
And replaces it with what repulses.
And lets the repulsion lead,
refusing to face the fact that the dead are actually dead.
Human
Children
Of God
