My Crime
By Khalil Sima’an
Cover art by Maysanne Murad - “18,800 Souls” commemorates the first 18,800 Palestinians who perished in Gaza in the 2023 genocide.
My crime
I am a thistle
in the throat of a cannon
a blood clot
in the veins of invaders
a scribble on the margins
of a decrepit promise
an afterthought on discarded maps.
My crime is that I live
and keep on living, like
a resounding love song
filled with hope
in the hollow halls
of criminal factories
for weapons of mass murder.
The Cemetery Of Conscience
“All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born”
(from Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats)
I.
There is no more time. No time at all
for death rites or wailing mothers
or ambulance sirens wailing
in between the debris and the rubble
of lives born in The Capitol's
Murder Registers. No roads left
to evacuate those declared dead
before ever truly living,
no refuge to shield the perpetual
refugee. No place for burial
rituals. This is the Cemetery
of Slain Conscience and Dignity.
This yard did not exist
on western maps-
erased years ago – until
the sky came down, at once, raining
torrents of home-made rockets,
“out of the blue.”
II.
Long before this place was bombed again,
this place was cursed in the death notes
of undertakers in black suits, and the notes
of fat gamblers filled with inflated
interest rates who wagered on brand new
weapons. This is not the right place to brood
over gentrified privileges
or cancelled voyages. No place
left for the seed of dignity
to grow. Not an inch for hope to seep
beneath this prison fence. But children
break through all fences, they burst out
of the pores of adolescence
and nothing, nothing can stop them
from blazing out of a besieged
childhood and a horizon born dead.
Behind this seventeen-year-old siege
a terrible beauty has gone wild!
III.
Tonight the lights went out in Gaza.
Fathers don’t have to shut the blinds
they don’t need to tuck their children
under blankets of fire and flare
from fighter jets above their heads.
Not one drop of water is left
to quench the thirst of the elderly
before they die, handing over
the rusty keys of hope to the next
generation. Not one crust of bread
remains before the false “free-world”
awakens.
Here, under the siege of conscience,
the strangled is denied resistance,
and children born with a death sentence
bury hope before they reach adolescence.
IV.
And the dead will welcome the dead
in purgatory because they are stateless
and doomed without burial grounds
for children born older than Biden
and children born “terrorists”
by birth, family name, skin, religion;
Allahu Akbar & The Holy Trinity
Allahu Akbar, I cry out in misery:
Why have you forsaken us?
Alone we battle for life in death,
and alone we battle death in life.
This child stands alone, and no one
would wipe her tears, and the yellow snot
of the hypocritical “free-world”
from her nose and the scars from her soul,
and the absent future from her present,
and hold her in their arms, for a while,
just hold her fragile hand, for a while.
V.
The reverse Exodus has begun
and Moses is not marching along
into the Cemetery of Conscience,
and the hot air mirage, death skulls
lining the way towards the Nile.
And Egypt has one Nile only,
and the Nile is not a nursing mother
for the stateless and dispossessed.
I saw a father push a cart
of US produced misery
and the remains of a family,
another carried a bag soaked in red,
his children’s remains, they said.
Once again, the “free-world” looks away.
They brought their remains
where two mothers bury
their miscarried unborns,
dead by starvation, killed
by a medieval siege.
And a red shirt kid with a parrot
on his shoulder. He teaches the parrot
sweet sound bites, like “self-defense”
and the “free-world.” I honestly ask you,
I ask myself, who will remain
to tell the story of the death
of the “free-world” conscience?
To the Atlantic God of Carnage
Pick up my limbs
like wet oysters
on the bloodied
Atlantic shorelines.
Collect my parts
on the waterlines
of war vessels
mighty and cold.
Like wind I spread
an intermittent whisper
of frothy foam
over the waves
like a bleeding cloud,
sticky and damp,
in the heavens
of flesh and bones.
With broken wings
I come to you, a child
solemn and black
I come to your shorelines
a corpse
a dirty cloth,
a blood bundle
of my remains.
God of carnage,
I beseech you:
I cannot be unborn
I will not be bottled
I will not be rubbed
an obedient
enslaved genie.
I will not be
trapped in a lamp.
I come to you
five thousand
burned children
I come to you
on a gold plate,
I stand again
at your closed gate
and I wait
I will wait and wait
and I will sing
with the children
of Red Indians
and the children
of Africans
and all those
you have enslaved;
the extinct tiger
the utter madness
in the bones of white men
the white colonies,
the raw skeletons,
the elements of valleys,
the coarse mountains
the raging bull
of Wall Street
and the pissing
Petit Julien
of grey Brussels.
I cannot be unborn
I will not be bottled
I will not be rubbed
an obedient
enslaved genie.
I will not be
trapped in a lamp.
A flapping flock
of dry bloodstains
on white canvas
I fly to you
my mother’s screams
on TV screens
my father’s burned face
on the covers of magazines
I come to you
like bloodied breakfast
cereal with morning news
like a dead turkey
in Thanksgiving
like the echoes of carnage
chiming with Christmas hymns
in the White House’s
hall of no shame.
I come to you
and I won’t wait
for the dead word
of the white masters
of “the free world”
drunk and arrogant,
greedy and ignorant,
lulling the old
dormant conscience
into mass graves
with a cold kiss
putrid and stoned
from the foul mouth
of crossbones.
In a bottle I float
towards your shorelines
a Sufi song
tall and serene,
a whirling gown,
solemn and white,
a swaddled newborn,
a white caped darwish
in a coffin.
Bury me now
in memory
know me as
a wild nightmare:
I cannot be unborn
I will not be bottled
I will not be rubbed
an obedient
enslaved genie.
I will not be
trapped in a lamp.