Lament For The Holy Land

“While I kept silent,

my body wasted away

  through my groaning

all day long.

For day and night your

hand was heavy upon me;

 my strength was dried up

as by the heat of summer.”

                 ---  Psalm 32:3-4

I wake up at night

and I can’t breathe

because injustice

is sitting on my chest,

heavy as words I’m not

supposed to say lest

I shatter the silence

that protects men

who could stop this

with the stroke of a pen,

men who look at a map

and only see a mirror

instead of land, instead of people,

while they always shrug and smirk,

“What is truth? What is truth anyway,

other than a reflection of my own right

to power and impunity?”

I don’t know how to pray

for this, and I don’t know

how to pray through this

in darkness that shouts,

"Do something!" Do some

thing about the shrieking

silence that puts mothers

inside tents of starvation.

Do some things about the

invisibility that assigns some

to be special and some to be

other, so much other that they

don’t exist or have any history

except silence on everyone’s lips,

which is how lies lie at rest

in beds at night while children

take cover beneath the violence

unsilently bulleting everything.

(Note: Photo below taken on a visit to Taybeh)