How is a tiny pink flower that peeps like a child from the billowing grass meant to make me smile when that little girl covered with dust on the screen is shaking like her borrowed bones are trying to escape? Her parents are under the rubble. I don't want to see pretty things in a world where her few remaining dreams assault the ground she lies on with demonic spectres of their severed love.
I can do a little better than guess what venom spreads through her and all the others’ captive bodies when the camera’s finished giving its hint. Trauma is probably no newer to them than it is to the weather-blasted planet. Every night since there were words for horror, someone has bolted from their sleep to scream them. The sun sets like a promised flood of mercy over the Mediterranean Sea, carries firelight away on drifting wisps for a small crowd. The camera can’t convey what these people see between glowing waves and gliding winds, but I can feel the chill that drips from its cavernous shadow.
To identify an object among middens of crumbled concrete is like trying to read a foreign script. No longer floors that worried mothers paced or walls where art was hung, the skeletons of structure interred in these pictures have grown too cold to cling to an old name. It’s not like beauty never came shrouded in that dusty grey, but even if a slab had fallen to the heap in the shape of a sleeping cygnet, I couldn’t stop to look. Not when there’s always a limp hand or leg protruding from its tomb. Fantasies as simple as a wall are still absurd to build when someone’s extinguished reality is cooling between the blocks.
I could choose to look at more familiar objects, whose names still feel safe on the tongues that speak them. Colours which innocent, quivering eyes have been callously denied may have lost their authority over my smile, but if I’m ever to find a solution to living with ash where there should be compassion, the words that I’m spluttering need to adhere to something. When I lower my eyes to scan the grass for a flower’s bright and untorn flesh, they’ll pause on nothing unless I can believe it’s a promise to that terrified child, or to the fathers who ran out of earth for their tears to water. I just need to know that there’s meaning left to be scavenged from a life whose trials no words could render just.
As grey turns to purple behind the trees’ skeletal silhouettes, I can only shudder at the wind’s harmless scratch on the tips of my ears. It’s uncannily safe compared to the facets of humanity that knock with an increasing urgency on my shield of trivial distractions. I wonder what it would be like to see my severed limbs sprawled across a bed of glass shards; not to know whether the hideous screech announcing my condemnation is from the monster fleeing through the air or from the destruction it drilled into my ears. A gull swings over the breeze, crying into whatever scraps of sunrise she can catch, but my vision glazes because I know I’ll never feel a dirty hospital floor on my back and die in a pool of someone else’s blood.
Let rage boil until it bleeds into every vessel of peace left struggling to hold my thoughts on track, but if that track can’t take me to a place where the shaking orphan grows into a monolith of will and self-determination, every sympathetic convulsion becomes an insult. I could scream until I vomit, but it won’t teach her the inalienable right for the word ‘no’ to occupy her lips. How am I supposed to marvel at the morning frost when no one’s there to hold her hand and walk her to a welcoming, empowering school? I’m trying, because I really want us all to live, but there’s Palestinian blood in my eyes.
I can do a little better than guess what venom spreads through her and all the others’ captive bodies when the camera’s finished giving its hint. Trauma is probably no newer to them than it is to the weather-blasted planet. Every night since there were words for horror, someone has bolted from their sleep to scream them. The sun sets like a promised flood of mercy over the Mediterranean Sea, carries firelight away on drifting wisps for a small crowd. The camera can’t convey what these people see between glowing waves and gliding winds, but I can feel the chill that drips from its cavernous shadow.
To identify an object among middens of crumbled concrete is like trying to read a foreign script. No longer floors that worried mothers paced or walls where art was hung, the skeletons of structure interred in these pictures have grown too cold to cling to an old name. It’s not like beauty never came shrouded in that dusty grey, but even if a slab had fallen to the heap in the shape of a sleeping cygnet, I couldn’t stop to look. Not when there’s always a limp hand or leg protruding from its tomb. Fantasies as simple as a wall are still absurd to build when someone’s extinguished reality is cooling between the blocks.
I could choose to look at more familiar objects, whose names still feel safe on the tongues that speak them. Colours which innocent, quivering eyes have been callously denied may have lost their authority over my smile, but if I’m ever to find a solution to living with ash where there should be compassion, the words that I’m spluttering need to adhere to something. When I lower my eyes to scan the grass for a flower’s bright and untorn flesh, they’ll pause on nothing unless I can believe it’s a promise to that terrified child, or to the fathers who ran out of earth for their tears to water. I just need to know that there’s meaning left to be scavenged from a life whose trials no words could render just.
As grey turns to purple behind the trees’ skeletal silhouettes, I can only shudder at the wind’s harmless scratch on the tips of my ears. It’s uncannily safe compared to the facets of humanity that knock with an increasing urgency on my shield of trivial distractions. I wonder what it would be like to see my severed limbs sprawled across a bed of glass shards; not to know whether the hideous screech announcing my condemnation is from the monster fleeing through the air or from the destruction it drilled into my ears. A gull swings over the breeze, crying into whatever scraps of sunrise she can catch, but my vision glazes because I know I’ll never feel a dirty hospital floor on my back and die in a pool of someone else’s blood.
Let rage boil until it bleeds into every vessel of peace left struggling to hold my thoughts on track, but if that track can’t take me to a place where the shaking orphan grows into a monolith of will and self-determination, every sympathetic convulsion becomes an insult. I could scream until I vomit, but it won’t teach her the inalienable right for the word ‘no’ to occupy her lips. How am I supposed to marvel at the morning frost when no one’s there to hold her hand and walk her to a welcoming, empowering school? I’m trying, because I really want us all to live, but there’s Palestinian blood in my eyes.