“It Was Not Yesterday But Today”

The day before, as he was lying down, he had wished never to wake up again. His dream had not been fulfilled. Dawn came the way it always comes in this land, in a pink, golden light.

He had ordered his heart to beat less loudly, his brain to stop thinking, his body to obey.

He was asked to tread his own path to Golgotha.

The week before, he had emptied his house with his neighbors’ help. That morning, he remembered to take the doors and windows down. He would use them to build the new home, as he promised the children. The older would help him. The little ones were under the care of women.

Before striking the first blow, he looked all around him. No cloud was disturbing the peace of the sky. No angel came down to put an end to this barbarity.

He struck harder and harder, in some fit of terrible rage, to be finished with the murder he was forced to commit—the murder of the house he had built twig after twig, feather by feather. The murder of his own home, his own heart.

The children would play on the doorstep. The women would sit under the arbor to sort lentils and rice, and stuff vegetables. His favorite spot was near the window overlooking the sunset.

He struck again and again. The house caved in like a glacier collapsing on itself, in a deafening sound, in the Antarctic.

He kept silent. But I knew. Those were not ice floes drifting on a bloody sea but pieces of his heart.

When it was all over, we could see a picture of poisonous beauty through the gutted façade. Sections of walls entangled in steel rods and wires.

Giant creepers swaying in thin air

 Relics of life mixed with death

That was not yesterday in Angkor

That was not in the land of the Incas

 in the days of Conquistadors

 That was not in the days of Crusaders

 stakes and Inquisition

 That was not in the days of death camps

 That was not in 1948 when the Conquerors

 ordered the destruction by sword and fire of five hundred villages

and condemned the villagers to exile

 But today in Jerusalem the eternal city

plunging into the night of the jackal

Poem initially published in Your Name Palestine by Olivia Elias. An illustrated chapbook in a limited edition, artwork by Basil King, translation from the French by Sarah Riggs & Jeremy Victor Robert (Word Poetry editor-NY, September 2023).