october 2004
Rana El-Khatib, Poet
These Poems are from her
publication
BRANDED: The
Poetry of a So-Called "Terrorist"
Please note that 3% of all sales of her book go toward
the organization Palestine Children's Relief Fund (www.pcrf.net). "It was through them
that I was given the opportunity to host two little
sisters from Rafah as they underwent treatment here in
the US ."
Holy Pulpit
Holy spectators you stand.
From your
pulpits you preach.
“End your sin.”
“It’s love that you must teach.”
A virtuous bellow.
A whole world apart.
Get down from your podium.
Revisit the start.
An invitation.
Take the test.
One month under occupation.
One month is all we request.
Sully your senses with scorched humanity.
Feel the clutches of perpetual poverty.
Endure the daily onslaught
Of their conqueror’s debauchery.
Stand under their darkened cloud.
Listen close for its booming sound.
Soak in the fury, endure oppression’s surge.
Experience life while teetering on its verge.
Get down from your pulpit.
Try on the clothes of the bandit.
In their den – you too can sit.
A witness to the daily blitz.
Walk a month in their shoes.
Walk a month in their skin.
Then you may start to understand
what drives them to “sin.”
* * * * * *
They Buried their Sun
Darkness stares back at a father.
A gaping hole promises him forever.
A cold, cavernous pit waits to enshroud the little waif,
Whose father once held him proud.
Through a crowd, the father wades.
He holds his son tightly in his arms.
He shelters his childish face
From any more harm.
A son cloaked in a blanket of death.
His little body stiff.
A father gazes disbelievingly
into the emptiness of the abyss.
He holds his son in a long, unwilling embrace.
His tears fill every pore on his grieving face.
His sobs catch his breath.
He wants more than life to accompany death.
His son, a limp, still being.
A silent witness to a world unfeeling.
He kisses his face with a fervor.
“Please don’t let this be forever.…”
A father gingerly strokes his son’s head,
Aching to reclaim his lifelessness from the dead.
His father wails, his voice left hoarse.
His killer callous, feeling no remorse.
Today a son lays in a dark, silent world
with a bullet lodged where once there were curls.
A mother watches from afar.
Her sun gone.
Her shining star.
A mother’s muffled pain,
drowned in the tides of disdain.
Her son’s brief life robbed of him.
Only fleeting memories
remain.
* * * * * *
Self-Determination
You can oppress an entire people.
Strip them of their history,
and throw a noose around their living.
But you cannot siphon the will to drink
from the well of self-determination.
It is a bottomless pit
made deeper
with every attempt to
bury its existence
Rana El-Khatibİ
The
poet can be wounded but not easily insulted. the poet's
secret which is not a secret but a form of high courage
is that he, in a strange way, does not care. The poet is
not concerned with the effect he is making; he forgets
himself.
PATRICK KAVANAGH