The Heart is a Security Risk

 

Thank you for searching my suitcase

As I left Palestine

Thank you for your note you left explaining what you did and why

A kind thought indeed

So you felt the need to open my suitcase

To go through my possessions

As I was leaving the country

An hour away from a flight home

Because?

Because I had been to The Occupied Territories?

Yeah I brought Palestinian items as gifts

Yeah I brought spices for my aching joints

Yeah I brought flowers from the garden of Gethsemane

I bought blown glass from Hebron

Did you see them?

I tell what you couldn’t find in my suitcase

Like a paranoid stalker

I brought the love back from Palestine

The meals offered in homes

The cold water shared freely

The watermelon and cucumber given to us by our new friends

I brought the warming smells of falafel in Manger Square

Said’s naughty laugh and his knowledge of the best bars in town

I brought Elias’ gentle calming consonants

I brought the voice of Daoud at The Tent of Nations who told us ‘he wouldn’t be your enemy’

Or Lulu who made a meal for us 30 strangers as she recounted how one morning soldiers came to demolish her house

I swallowed Mahmoud Darwish’s nourishing poems

I brought the blue Bethlehem sky

I carry the smiles from Sami at the Liwan cafe

I didn’t bring your wall your guns your skunk juice your obsession with cameras your shoot round the corner shotguns settler violence armoured vehicles your bullets your uniforms your checkpoints your guntowers your permits

No I left them all there  They. Are. Yours.

They are yours

No

I brought  home the love from Palestine

I brought home the light in 5 year old Raja s eyes as we played frisbee

And the  voices of Violette and the other women in Nazareth who weaved a tapestry of hope

Stitched into my soul

Yeah remember that

I brought those home

You will never find them

So keep going through the suitcases with your grubby paranoid military desecrating hands

For you             will          never                            take

What I brought home

From Palestine

 

Letter to a Guntower

 

I have been watching you for days

As we pass you by

You rise like a grey fist        From this ancient earth

Blocking out the blue sky

 

Yes there have been wars here before

But not like this

David morphing into a marauding Goliath

 

What is it that you see

With your unsleeping electronic eyes?

A tunnel trained vision of a created enemy

An other fit for falling

Destruction  masquerading as security

 

Do you dream of escape

To the mountains, away into the stretching sea?

And to remove those metal blinkers

And feel the soft breeze upon you, to awake?

 

I have heard you murdered children

Who played peacefully beneath you

Do you even know their names?

Is your heart so hardened you feel no remorse or shame?

 

You think you are impenetrable

But I believe you are unhappy

And dread each day

Why not open your roof

For the sky to flood in

Invite children to climb freely

And let them plant flowers

Where your guns now take aim

To build not destroy

They will be watered by

Your tears                 Of liberation, peace and joy,

 

This is not a Poem

 

WE DO NOT TARGET CIVILIANS

Says regev on 18^th December as the beads of sweat form precariously on his forehead

On the 17^th December a 12 year old girl Dunia Abu Mohsen was killed when a tank fired shell struck her head while she lay asleep in hospital

She was recovering from having her leg amputated after an Israeli attack killed six members of her family including both her parents and two of her siblings in Nasser Hosptial in Khan Younis on October 27^th

Dunia had been interviewed in November where she said she wanted to be a doctor like those who were treating her  so she too could help people

Her words haunt me her innocent eyes reach out to us  as  the bombs still fall and countries abstain from calling for a ceasefire

‘I only want one thing, for the war to end’ say the subtitles on the frozen screen

Regev takes his mic off and thanks  the interviewer politely

We do not target civilians he reiterates

The sweat falls, he wipes his brow

The screen goes blank

 

Dunia Abu Mohsen aged 12 murdered by the state of Israel 17^th December along with 8000 other children

We do not target civilians echoes in my head

It was reported that Dunia was going to be moved to Egypt on the 20^th December for treatment

 

Patrick Jones’ published work includes The Guerilla Tapestry (1995), The Protest Of Discipline (1996), Detritus (1997), Mute Communion (1997), Commemoration and Amnesia (Big Noise Productions, 1999), Fuse (Parthian Books, 2001), Against (2003), Darkness is where the stars are (Cinnamon Press, 2008), Tongues for a Stammering Time (Anhrefn Records, 2009), The Aspirations of Poverty (Red poets, 2017).

Photos taken by the author on his visit to the Occupied Territories in June, 2023.