When my conscience cannot get out
afraid of fainting of myself
I have to settle for laws

the books of emergency dressing
for blood that I don't want to see
for a wound they should have prevented

If necessary, we fight it out
in court or with God
on our side, I have help

of lawyers and soldiers
priests assist me
the loudest word is up to me

If necessary, I will stop the world
until there are new laws
and then I'll start anew

if all goes well

my mirror
has been screaming at me
for a while
I chose to walk away today
but it began to follow
became a black shadow
creeping into my cranium
to stay

broken reflection
in my head
that closing eyes
couldn’t save
shaking the grains
in my brain
didn’t help
like shattered glass
it slithered and sliced
my skin and scalp

cutting the chords
of light from my eye
bleeding fingers from braille
left me blind
without vision
there’s no escaping
the mirror
of reason
in my mind

”Don’t look!”, mother said
“It’s not for your eyes to see”
So it sat there, that little red box
in-between curiosity and me
“Be a good boy and put it down
promise to never open the lid,
You never un-see, or undo
a memory, you wish you never did”

I traced the edge, gave it a shake
and placed upon it my ear
listening what may mysteriously make
that ruffle from what I could hear
So I sat a lot, wondering what
could possibly be inside
It’s only a peak, I’m much too weak
my conscience I cannot hide

It can’t hurt, no one will know
after all, it’s just a little look
I’ll open and close, see how it goes
no harm, just like a book
tempting as is, a ‘sorry’ can’t fix
I wish to have kept my word
when mother was gone
and I, with the box alone
peeped in and out flew a bird

The Story
by Kamal Nasser
translation by Michael R. Burch

I will tell you a story ...
a story that lived in the dreams of my people,
a story that comes from the world of tents.
It is a story inspired by hunger and embellished by dark nights of terror.
It is the story of my country, a handful of refugees.
Every twenty of them have a pound of flour between them
and a few promises of relief ... gifts and parcels.
It is the story of the suffering ones
who stood waiting in line ten years,
in hunger,
in tears and agony,
in hardship and yearning.
It is a story of a people who were misled,
who were thrown into the mazes of the years.
And yet they stood defiant,
disrobed yet united
as they trudged from the light to their tents:
the revolution of return
into the world of darkness.

Kamal Nasser was a much-admired Palestinian poet and Palestinian Christian, who due to his renowned integrity was known as "The Conscience." He was a member of Jordan's parliament in 1956. He was murdered in 1973 by an Israeli death squad whose most notorious member was future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak (born Ehud Brog) later ruled as Israel’s tenth Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001. His adopted Hebrew name Barak means "lightning." As a younger man, Brog/Barak was a member of a secret assassination unit that liquidated Palestinians in Lebanon and the occupied territories. In the 1973 covert mission Operation Spring of Youth in Beirut, which was part of the larger Operation Wrath of God, he disguised himself as a woman in order to assassinate Palestinians. The raid resulted in the deaths of two women, one of them an elderly Italian. Two Lebanese policemen were also killed, along with the poet Kamal Nasser.

Nasser was the PLO's most prominent Christian and he enjoyed "great appeal" in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq "both as a distinguished poet and likeable personality." He was the “conscience of the Palestinian revolution,” according to Nazih Abul-Nidal, who worked with him on the magazine Filastin al-Thawra. Nasser “had the most democratic outlook of all Palestinian leaders at the time,” he recalls. He respected opposing views, admired the commitment of young people, and was a major recruitment asset for the Palestinian revolution. “That is why he was put high on the hit-list.” The previous year, the Israelis had murdered another renowned Palestinian writer and activist in Beirut, Ghassan Kanafani, by *****-trapping his car. Nasser’s successor, Majed Abu Sharar, was also assassinated by Israelis, in Rome in 1981 while attending a conference in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Keywords/Tags: Kamal Nasser, Palestinian, Palestine, PLO, Conscience, Ramallah, Christian, religion, poet, Arab, Arabic, Arab Spring, betrayal, conflict, courage, devotion

A worm in my head

wants to wriggle at my fate –


it drives me crazy.

Brown Brown brown
A majestic salute
Of this **** on bone
Into my mouth
Irreverent despise
This effigious moment
Of makes my surmise
Of this meat from this plate
Surety tu sate
It's Satan's will
In deep do I swill
Of all the kingdom's fawn
Fauna's adorn
Adorn ornate
From the midth of my plate
Into my bellies belie
Belittle my sweet tooth
From tooth suit sooth
The feel of my carnivorous desire
And it's encroach
To ****** from the animal kingdom
A bane or benign male
Or of femality
A skinned creature or scaled
Once skinned then scaled
To the nth of my teeth
From it's evolutionary course
To my 'mmms' whence eat
"I farm therefore I am"
My requite
My requiem
It's internment within my duodenum
If we as homosapien
We're a little lower
Of the evolutionary ladder
A little closer
To the whipchuk and adder
Perhaps this incongruity
Would seem of insurmount
That we would not take from the platter
Of that skitter skatter
Of paws and of hoof
Of feather and of scale
For it not our right
To interrupt the plight
Of species cultural agare
And of universal development
Of ******* disposition
And it's extant
Perhaps we'd be more likely
To drop a tear
Than a mensonge long of langue
A salivating spittle
Like the whistle and the sizzle
Of that press upon the plate
Of heated black iron
The steam and the vapour
Testament to the savour
To the saviour of the meal
As any connoisseur can tell you
Unless they alien to meat
The saviour of the meal
That muscular tender form
That reared from the twinkle
To the wink
The seed met it's drink
The phoetus
To the expressed
******* delight
This formling's fledgling plight
As it's eyes burn to new light
Of its heart and marrow and sinew
All fodder to our ensue
Of it's marriage to this world
Now married to our plate
Its existence to sate
Our sensory intuition
And if questioned
The lesser the tuition
Of salt and fat to the sate
Of blood and metal to the taste
Of bone and cartilage the waste
Unless hungry enough to chew
And **** it's marrow clean
And this meal
As if adieou
Of all memory
Of that beast's sense
Of this reality
And this brown brown brown
The king and capital of plate
And our position upon the evolutionary ladder
A little less seemingly madder
Of this culture of interrupting culture
For the satisfaction of our tongue
And of this insanity
Most seemingly insane
Shall affirm of our humane
As our cultural attest
To the other species detest
That the brown brown brown
Be a salute
From fork to mute
Of our common humanity
For whose going to stop us
The birds or the bees
And this brown brown brown
Be the flag of the humanity we wear
From infamy of mind
To the pork and the pear
Laid bare
Upon our shirt or lapel
Surely if we are to grapple
With ideas of genocide's justification
It's after picking the brown fibre
Of a pig's won't to pork
Upon your new shirt
With a clean silver fork
Or after dessert