An olive on a stranger's lips

Becomes the soul of yesterday

Come sit down

Let us dream

As you call out my names:

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Yawm Jum'a

I'm a sky of olives

And on your lips

My memory unfolds

My soul's fiery roots

Are drunk life coffee

And eaten like houmous

And swallowed like bitternes

And consumed like love's strangeness

And offered to guests

Without caution

Like a dish

Improvised

The dinner table is loaded

And from among the sweet grapes

Like a song

Rose the austere richness of a taste

Only those who share my fate

Can embrace

The 'ud in pain-like recognition

Dyed  the gold of this sigh

With its colour

Impassioned

With its melody

We sit down

We drink and laugh

Since how long

Am I hidden in you?

This is a feast of joys and tears

A feast of orange groves

Of olives

Figs, sabras and grapes

Of song and lament

In a soul

That long since has begun to live

In a stranger's heart

And needs

The lips of a stranger

To speak of itself

And an alien time

To find back to its tides

And an alien sea

To traverse with its waves

To strand

On its own shore

But the sea itself spoke:

Prophets and God's guests

Know no strangeness

And the 'ud like the wide bird of dawn

With white wings plaughs the fields of dusk

To harvest

The beginning

 

WE ARE YOUR SOUL, PALESTINE, AND YOUR SWEETNESS.

COMRADE SAADAT SHALL NOT BE FORGOTTEN.

 

The slave bearing the yoke

Rises

And the yoke

Becomes

His weapon.

If the price for survival

Is silence,

I shall not pay it.

 

I'm Sunni and Shi'ite

I am Christian and Muslim

I'm a man, I'm a woman

And a child

I'm an Arab of Palestine

This is

What I am

And Palestine did not

Ask of me

Anything

But my heart

For love, Solomon says

Is as strong as death and

Should I give my life

My blood, my soul

For the sake of love,

It would not be enough

I'm the sea and the desert

And the sweetness of stony earth

I'm your heaven

And your stars,

Palestine,

And nothing else

Nothing less

To my freedom my scars testified

Back in time

In the torture jail of Ramallah

In the hands of captors

Who

(I saw it)

Are captives of their fears

Turned stone

Barbed wire

And yoke:

Freedom

Betrayed

Hope

Given up

Hollow

Its sound

Humanity

Sacrificed

Too scared to ask:

What for?

(Borthers once):

Two branches

The old ones recount

Of one tree

Two fingers

Of one hand

I'm mighty as life itself

By degradation

Sanctified

Christ who carries the cross

And shall never be

Cruzified

And Phoenix who rises

From the ashes of dear

Kufr Dweimah

And Buraq

O Buraq

Who touched the dome of Al Aqsa

Bearing the eyes

Of God