By Bassemah (2)

What connects me to a place

I’ve always known but never occupied,

whose vivid memories dance like fairy tales in my mind?

Their stories become my connections

brought late at night

mixed in with ancient lullabies.

The water had to be boiled for the bath

in the village.

The baker only a short walk away.

The strength of her grandmother,

the cruelty of her school teachers,

boundless dreams,

and the fondness of her love

swim in the sea of my memories.

Love letters carved onto oranges,

read in tree branches,

consumed without a trace,

with the insatiable want of a forbidden fruit

live in my narrative now.

He was a city boy, an Old City boy,

and reckless.

More connections I discovered

at sunrise before school

over strong coffee and cigarettes.

He was young, a boxer, and a charmer.

He defended the weak in the streets,

held a Jordanian rifle,

an antique,

on this side of the fence,

and hunted birds with the boys

in the hills near the caves.

He flirted with British girls

because he could,

and left his homeland at nineteen

for a better life

and forty years.

To them I am connected.

And to the refugee I’m connected

Who inherits not a fortune in property

but a fortune in loss?

Ours is a connection to what we

are prohibited from knowing again.

Pushed off at gunpoint,

or by stories, and recollections…

a massacre at a bordering village,

or killed,

leaving those left to grieve

in suicidal desperation.

How can we talk about connections?

Ours were severed in 1948

with more to fade since ‘67

and daily in hostilities at airports

and checkpoints

or demolitions

for the birth of another homeless

family

longing for that which connected them

to their past,

to their future,

seeing and hearing and smelling it

crushed before them,

surrounded by rocks

and well guarded machine guns.

We are longing for that connection

which bleeds inside of us

like aching memories of that tender soil

clinging to the severed remains

of yet another tree of olives uprooted,

disconnected from its home

In Palestine.

03/2005 Bassemah

By my dear friend Bassemah

Palestine

A tree with scaly branches was

born in me and

my country change

her name and people.

They wear icicles on their tongues,

our replacements.

I saw them pierce my mother’s breast

every time she remembered.

And when I tell them where

I am from

I see the ice fly from their lips

and their laughter at my back.

En masse the hearts rot to black

theirs and ours.

The streets they smirk at my heels,

the ones

my great-grandfather built.

Now they smirk at his grave.

The color of forgetful eyes

is false.

Oppressed becomes oppressor.

And those unheard will be forgotten soon.

These biting thorns have shaped a land

where once olive groves

dug deep into the sand.

Bassemah

Fall 1996-Chicago

THE NEW MILLENIUM PLUS SEVEN

Heroes

We need to be heroes
And give our lives to the truth

We cannot stay silent
We must not be mute

We need to be heroes
And be ever versatile

And keep on pushing ourselves
Yet always with style

But we are so angry, all the time
That we don't know, where to begin

And we don't know, what, or who
Is worth investing in

Yet, we want to inspire and be inspired

We want to desire and be desired

We want to burn and create fire

But I'd say, most of all,

We want to never, ever, ever

Get tired

A poem by a friend

Paying the price of stubbornness

There are some lessons,
I just don't want to learn
And some tears,
I just don't want to cry
And therefore,
Sometimes,
I am simply left to yearn
Because fear,
Forces me,
To let life pass me by
As I look on,
Paralized,
Alone,
Left out in the cold,
Because,
There are just some hands,
That I can't stand to hold.

JESUS CAMP (ARMY OF GOD)

DEAR ALL,

The following link leads to a report on a recently released documentary about a boot camp - with a difference- for kids in the US. This horrific docu shows details of Jesus Camp, where children are trained to be "warriors" in the Army of God. Watch, be horrified and pass it on - to show how sick the organisers behind this initiative are....

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xp4e5_jesus-camparmy

REGAINING YOUR BRAIN

some recommended sites for REGAINING YOUR BRAIN

www.Globalresearch.ca
www.Democracynow.org
www.Freepress.org
www.Axisoflogic.com
www.Counterpunch.org
www.Mediamatters.com
www.Commondreams.com
www.Regainyourbrain.org
www.Prisonplanet.tv
www.Rockymountainnews.com
www.Physics911.org
www.Tinyurl.com
www.Informationclearinghouse.info

BACK TO THE WORD THING

"It's all a battle of words, you see, and most of them are lies...listen, son, said the man with the gun...there's room for you inside." PINK FLOYD, Dark Side of the Moon

If you can be told....

If you can be told what to see or read...
then it follows,
that you can be told what to say or think...


Defend your universal human right to speak and think for yourself ... no-one else will do it for you

WORDS ARE MEANINGLESS AND FORGETTABLE?

So the song by Depeche Mode goes. Hmm, I agree but that's not what I wanted to point out about words today
I just want to say that there is too bloody many of them
Too many words, saying nothing
KILIMAT FA'DI - EMPTY WORDS

We are wafflised every day - avalanched, overwhelmed, washed away by torrents of words, when the underlying message of each communication could be often explained with "cúpla focail".

Luis Borges once said (or I'm sure he said it more than once - he probably said it hundreds of times) that most books could be written in a few pages. Why write a novel of 300 pages when a short story could suffice?

So I have decided to focus on the message -
The short sweet message


And what's the message for today?
"All has been said (and written): the problem is no-one is listening"

Stay tuned

Walking in Ramallah

Blue skies, warm sunshine, throwing beautiful light on the cream-coloured stone houses

Litter galore on the broken pavements and patches of green between roads and buildings

Wadis (valleys) dotted with rocks, rusty cans and olive trees

Hills

Half-finished houses and burnt out cars

Stone steps down to the wadi and back up again

Donkeys and wild dogs

Quaint little houses with overgrowing grape vines and sofas in the yard

A show of force from the Manara square (centre of town) – some Katay’ab* members hanging out of jeeps,

Brandishing snarls and serious guns,

While coffee-drinkers look down from the first floor

“Stars & Bucks” Café

(Does the entrepreneur owner know that the management of the famous chain he’s imitating is Zionist?)

The Katay’ab guys have a megaphone:

They deny responsibility for

A burnt out shop owned by a Hamas supporter – torched some days ago

Women – veiled and unveiled - with children in tow, carry their shopping home

The Muqa’ta - the president’s compound, where Arafat was once under house arrest - under construction and under guard

Green uniforms, bored looks and red berets

The arid botanic garden

The air is pregnant with invisible spies and collaborators, lurking undercover

Pirate DVD heaven

Cries of “Taxi, taxi, taxi?”

Cries of the fruit sellers

Peasant women in traditional dress sitting on upturned plastic buckets and selling

Herbs, figs, pomegranates

A bodybuilders’ emporium and umpteen money changers/ jewellery shops

More guns – small guns, big guns, bigger guns, toy guns, guns with bullets, guns without

Guns on posters, cradled in the arms of martyrs

”Palestine over all” placards on the roundabout

This the idea of some brave local women –

“We want to scream NO to the infighting. This is not what Palestine is about!”

Sha’bab** everywhere – walking, smoking, observing

Drinking Nescafé in plastic cups from street vendors

No jobs, no wife, no life, no future

Jesus wept and Mohammed prayed

Old kuffiya-clad men smoke hookah and play shesh-besh (backgammon)

Beside the hi-tech shop with the plasma screen TVs

And stores selling grain and nuts and strange powdery white rocks kept in white buckets

Looks like chalk,

Tastes like yoghurt

Oh Ramallah!





*Katay’ab is the Arabic term for the Al Aqsa martyrs’ brigades – armed wing of Fateh

**Sha’bab is Arabic term for youth