Source: 8 To Read from Gaza
Archive for the ‘writing’ Category
8 To Read from Gaza
Posted in writing on July 13, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Happy 4th of July! Isn’t it time for the promise of freedom to come true?
Posted in writing on July 4, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Today is the 4th of july, Independence Day in the US. A day when Americans everywhere celebrate their independence from Britain. After a hard fought war and inspired by some brilliant statesmanship,a new nation was born. Big promises were made, a lot of people faced a great deal of hardships then.
I also celebrate Independence Day, I celebrate the 4th of July, even from Stockholm. Not with fireworks and picnics, but with this post. This post is a beginning of a long look at the US. It’s history and it’s role in the world. How did we get here? Are we free? Please, dear reader, check back on these pages after your chicken bbq, after lots of fireworks and hopefully a safe drive home.
Be safe on this day, give a prayer to those who died for promise of freedom and ask yourself what can you do to ensure that…
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Where Have They Gone, parts 1 and 2
Posted in writing on July 4, 2017| Leave a Comment »
1.
Where have they gone
The young and the proud?
Will we say their names again?
Will we sing their praises on Sundays in church?
Will their photographs hang in Willies’ barbershop windows
Alongside the heroes of World War 2,
The Norman Rockwell prints
And his autographed photos of Ted Williams and Rocky Marciano?
Will there be a celebration of their sacrifices in the town square
The mayor making a speech and mounting a plaque?
The mothers and sisters and wives crying inconsolably?
Or will their fathers hide their grief in bottles of moonshine
The bitterness growing with every drop
Their mothers asking themselves in secrecy what they’ve done wrong
Sisters feeling unprotected without big brother
Little brothers lacking a role model, what chance do they have?
Will no one waltz in the street when their names are mentioned
Or will they merely turn their grief away?
Who will lead…
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Blackboard
Posted in aging, death, depression, dreams, empowerment, grief, growing old, hope, life, poetry, writing, tagged life, Literature, poems, poetry, Word on May 30, 2017| Leave a Comment »
My sky is my life
My life is the sky,
My mind is a valley, covered in fog,
Like an glass eye, staring vacant,
Like a treetop aching for the sun.
My soul is spread across the horizon
Like an undiscovered canticle
On a blackboard, hidden,
As if anything written across its virgin black
Might change the world before it disappears.
Are we but a blackboard with
Words wiped away?
The lost thought, the pretext, now the past,
Sent away to define their own east and west?
Our words, our lusts, our prayers,
Words where there are no words
Souls where there are no souls
Abandonment where there was once substance
But with a little imagination
Can we find ourselves un-erased?
A blackboard obscure and somber
The sun fades forever
Into the blackness,
Into the dust.
Phrases hidden in faint visions
Our once solemn vows are but
Remnants of a civilization.
Ideas that never flourished
Never gave a reward,
Never gave nourishment to an empty soul
Never a grain left behind, but an already eaten morsel,
Stale and quotidian
My life is a brazen question
Unasked and unanswered
Forgotten on the lips of a corpse.
Let Us Drunkenly Compare Mythologies – by Lou Graves
Posted in writing on May 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Hope, (A Lament From The Trail Of The Refugee)
Posted in depression, dreams, empowerment, freedom, gaza, grief, Homs, hope, inequality, israel, justice, life, loss, MENA, Mohammed, nakba, palestine, personal growth, poetry, refugee camp, refugees, regret, writing, tagged apartheid, asylum, despair, exile, faith, famine, fraternity, friends, gaza, Gaza Strip, home, hope, hopelessness, hunger, illegal settlements, kibbutz, love poetry, Nakba, pain, palestine, peace, poems, poetry, refugees, sadness, sorrow, Syria, the earth, violence, Writing on April 29, 2017| Leave a Comment »
There can be no I here,
And I can see
There is to be no you,
But soft, that we go together
As friends
To where the dogwood will flower
And the scent of lilac fills the breath of
The disappointed and
The forever tired
With calm. And
We shall bathe in the universe,
Bask in the glories of the sun.
Sweeping aside
Who we were, what we are,
As the day laps on our skin
Gently like a kitten
On a path.
We can’t look behind us.
It is but a sad illusion for those such as us.
We can bring no oil, no wine, no myrrh.
No more of the streets of our youth
No more of the wine vats
In our once luscious gardens.
There is but small growth among them.
Olive trees, dark, like skeletons,
Scorched and barren.
All growth for them is finished but for
The light we afforded their charred roots.
Nothing is there but exile for us.
Let us go.
Let us hasten our renewals.
Now is the time to be kind.
Let us not have this darkness now.
Their suns and moons are no longer ours,
Let us go, as friends should.
Our clouds will flow immaculate over the hills
And leave their traces gently on their souls
With the softness of the freshest cotton,
Lambs wool in the pink morning sun.
Let us go on our way
With nary a backwards glance,
But there, towards our own new present.
Me, the poet
You the eternal traveler.
No longer reticent, but brave in our pace.
Let us go to that place
As friends to the day.
The Aroma of Coffee – Arab Hyphen
Posted in writing on March 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »
