The Naqbah: The great catastrophe

Angry Arab has always these pictures of Palestinians showing the keys to the homes they were evicted from.

It is believed that more than 30,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed by the Israeli army in the past 35 years.

In 1948, Israel destroyed and obliterated more than 480 Palestinian villages in Palestine after forcing hundreds of thousands of villagers to flee their homes at gunpoint.

And on this day all I can think of is poetry by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich:

MY MOTHER

I long for my mother's bread
My mother's coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother

And If I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
With a lock of your hair

With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a god
If I touch the depths of your heart

If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand
I am old

Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest

MOUNT CARMEL IS IN US

We do not need to be reminded:

Mount Carmel is in us

and on our eyelashes the grass of Galilee.

Do not say: If we could run to her like a river.

Do not say it:

We and our country are one flesh and bone.

Before June we were not fledgeling doves

so our love did not wither in bondage.

Sister, these twenty years

our work was not to write poems

but to be fighting.

The shadow that descends over your eyes

-demon of a God

who came out of the month of June

to wrap around our heads the sun-

his color is martyrdom

the taste of prayer.

How well he kills, how well he resurrects!

The night that began in your eyes-

in my soul it was a long night's end:

Here and now we keep company

on the road of our return

from the age of drought.

And we came to know what makes the voice of the nightingale

a dagger shining in the face of the invaders.

We came to know what makes the silence of the graveyard

a festival...orchards of life.

You sang your poems, I saw the balconies

desert their walls

the city square extending to the midriff of the mountain:

It was not music we heard.

It was not the color of words we saw:

A million heroes were in the room.

This land absorbs the skins of martyrs.

This land promises wheat and stars.

Worship it!

We are its salt and its water.

We are its wound, but a wound that fights.

Sister, there are tears in my throat

and there is fire in my eyes:

I am free.

No more shall I protest at the Sultan's Gate.

All who have died, all who shall die at the Gate of Day

have embraced me, have made of me a weapon.

Ah my intractable wound!

My country is not a suitcase

I am not a traveler

I am the lover and the land is the beloved.

The archaeologist is busy analyzing stones.

In the rubble of legends he searches for his own eyes

to show

that I am a sightless vagrant on the road

with not one letter in civilization's alphabet.

Meanwhile in my own time I plant my trees.

I sing of my love.

It is time for me to exchange the word for the deed

Time to prove my love for the land and for the nightingale:

For in this age the weapon devours the guitar

And in the mirror I have been fading more and more

Since at my back a tree began to grow.