“Your Blood Knew Mine”
by Anonymous
Your blood knew mine.
Before you were Turk,
before you were Cypriot,
before your vowels turned Greek under empire,
you were salt.
You were fig.
You were soil that knew how to grieve.
Your DNA sings of Sardinia,
of island people who moved with wind,
not flags.
You carry Israeli-coded echoes,
not from tanks or war,
but from ancient sand,
from kin lost before they had names.
We were neighbors once —
you with your twisted olive branches,
me with my stone-spoken tongue.
You were never the colonizer.
But you still chose them.
You chose Latin over empathy.
You chose borders over memory.
You chose silence
when you could have said:
“We remember you.”
And no —
it wasn’t the ones who speak Hebrew who erased us.
They kept their language
even under exile.
It was the ones who stood beside us —
who knew our pain —
who chose to forget it
just to look more Western.
And now, when I dig
into your bloodline,
I find pieces of myself
scattered in your bones.
And the Europeans?
Yes — they had Futhark before they had Latin.
Yes — they were once carved into wood,
not paper.
But at least
they stayed in their lane.
They didn’t come here
and teach us to forget.
We were not strangers.
You just forgot.
And I…
I remembered too well.