Brotherly people
Al-shaʿb al-shaqīq
الشعب الشقيق
Sail, sail, sail,
In the corridor of life,
For my love for you,
Extraordinary people I never met,
Natives of your land,
All that has disappeared now,
Will never fade away from the world’s memory.
Humankind never learns sometimes,
but some of us do.
Some of us have unselective compassion
for the free folks of the world,
who are enduring tyranny.
There is no color, no religion, no gender, no sexual orientation,
when it comes to oppression.
And then apartheid, and at last genocide,
a maelstrom of hatred and cruelty,
wakened by the folly of indoctrination,
founded in the existential fear of disappearing, because of an unspeakable tragedy of the past.
Is this what our unresolved traumas,
inherited from our ancestors,
make us do in the present ?
An endless spiral of suffering and death, we inflict on ourselves, and mostly on others ?
Is this how we fulfill an ancient prophecy that promises us our disappearance ?
Precipitating the unavoidable fate,
and reproducing the horror our grandparents have been through ?
The deletion of the mind,
The mutilation of the body,
The affliction of the soul for a lifetime,
…And the final annihilation.
My heart sails with those who at least try,
breaking the unbreakable,
in the boats of destiny,
taking together a piece of freedom,
across the Mediterranean Sea,
where my roots belong,
where millennia of history lie,
in the Fertile Crescent…
…We are brotherly peoples,
Palestinians and Egyptians.
I'm sorry we have failed you in the present.
There is not a single soul that shouldn’t be tormented by our own powerlessness.
Our fate is linked ;
I write this with gravity, yet with lucidity.
If you disappear, tomorrow we will too, whether we come from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria or Egypt...
...Or from the Western countries.
This is about our genes, our DNA,
whose heritage I will always be proud to share with you.
May the Global Sumud flotillas remind us
to be there,
to gather in the streets like we never did,
until the time has come for Palestine to be free, from the river to the sea.
#palestine
#freepalestine
#globalsumudflotilla
Younis M.