Epigraph
from a poem "Under Siege" by Mahmoud Darwish,
he says to an Israeli soldier:
"If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again."
Identity
this poem is dedicated to Mahmoud Darwish
with my deepest gratitude and a bow to his humanism and poetic powers.
If we want to know the face of the victim
we would have to keep at the retina of our eyes
the eyes of a dying Palestinian child
and the eyes of a dying Jewish child
who have no understanding of what is happening,
not even of death,
but can only silently scream with the question
of why it hurts so much
if we want to know the face of the victim
we will have to keep at the retina of our eyes
the face of the child's Palestinian mother and
the face of the Jewish mother
which is not a face any more
but the mortal wound
and she still has to live with it till the end of her days --
then we will be free of any reason to throw a bomb
in a place where
not my child, not your child
but the child plays
There is only one identity for being human.
27 Март 2010 г.