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POEMS FROM PALESTINE BOULLATA Like a song dissolved in longing, Tearing apart the drapes of evening Destroying the spring of sighs. Beloved The joy of the days in my cell Embraces darkness; and my silence Annuls the blade of the torturer The thief of my childhood dreams I will turn back at him in the day's heat. Beloved The prison is a brief cloud, The bitter winds Of a cold journey We must accomplish. Our road is wrapped in sighs Tears and thorns in all That dark claws can knit. But our love shall triumph At the end of the road. There We will meet our sun, Its fire shall enter every house Fill every crack. The sun shall flood Mountains, hills and plains Beloved, as we are its children This shall certainly come about. As I sat in a corner of my cell Lacing picked light, stretching It to these lines, seed by seed, I was struck with a child's joy Beloved: because With all the might of their hatred Murdering Life They forget they cannot Put my mind in jail. Fawzi Al Asmar TO HER SISTER AND COMRADE IN RESISTANCE —I said it, as the beast wanted, In the savagery of the investigation Forgive me sister, beloved I said 'Yes' not because I could not hear the harsh pain not because one of the barbarians kept hammering my bloody head to the wall investing torture, throwing me like a morsel in the jaws of weakness If this was all, I would have endured with the patience of my stubborn pride and the strength of faith and belief But one face among them wanted to— Sister forgive me for I still tremble When I remember what I cannot say But ten years of my life Will be chewed by bars Controlled by the jailor I pay the atonement For the moment of my surrender. Fadwa Tukan Passages from ENEMY OF THE SUN I may—if you wish—lose my livelihood I may sell my shirt and bed. I may work as a stone cutter A street sweeper, a porter. I may clean your stores Or rummage your garbage for food I may lie down hungry, Enemy of the sun I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist. You may take the last strip of my land Feed my youth to prison cells You may plunder my heritage. You may burn my books, my poems Or feed my flesh to the dogs. You may spread a web of terror On the roofs of my village, Enemy of the sun I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist. Samih Al Kasim GUERRILLA Dark, motionless, he stood Eyes fixed on barbed wire Swimming in distant lights. 45
