"It is our ancestors' legacy that we never leave our land that we never let go of 'Ayn Ghazzal, that we never forget that it is us and our families who are Palestine, and that ultimately we have to return to our beloved land, and that its love will return to us." Mohammad Mansara
In disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
Alone,
beweeping our outcast state
suffering a deaf heaven, heedless of our cries,
our truncated country,
our jacked up lives.
They pulled off a big armed robbery
In Jaffa, the Bride of the Sea,
One hundred sixteen thousand expelled
four thousand remaining
forced into Ajami.
Hot march away from Lydda
Audeh sees a baby suck
the breast
of its ummi
Dead under the Palestinian sun.
Another mother, jostled by throngs
Drops her baby, a metal cart wheel
runs over its neck
Farmers work for the land thieves
Who call them Israeli Arab
They work
To feed their children scorpions.
Notes:
ummi: mother in Arabic
Read further about the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa, how its residents who weren't expelled were forced to live in a slum in Ajami as they watched Jewish immigrants take over their houses and possessions, and how once proud landowners were reduced to working as laborers on their own land that was stolen by the Zionist immigrants in "Jaffa: From Eminence to Ethnic Cleansing."
Read Mohammad Mansara's "We Loved the Land and the Land Loved Us." in Al-Majdal's Nakba Special Issue, Winter 2007/Spring 2008 His life as a refugee in Iraq and now in Sweden has been both tragic and inspiring.
Read excerpts from Father Audeh Rantisi's Blessed Are the Peacemakers: The Story of a Palestinian Christian. Father Audeh, a refugee from Lydda, witnessed the baby sucking at its dead mother's breast and also the death of the baby from the metal wheel as he and his family were forced to walk in one hundred degree heat after expulsion from the town in which his family had lived for 1600 years.
# posted by umkahlil @ 11:39 PM
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