#PoeticLicence: Demolition, destruction, explosions and death, yet hoping for the best

Author Rabbie Serumula. File image.

Author Rabbie Serumula. File image.

Published May 23, 2021

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The ground underneath their feet is pulsating.

Palestinian people are palpitating. Projectiles propelled to their placement.

Bomb shelters as basements.

But even from there you can hear spirits separate from flesh.

The wailing, the wrecking, the levelling, the tearing down of their lineage.

Demolition, destruction, explosions and death, yet hoping for the best.

The raging storm of Israeli missiles has no eye.

Fires there are too stubborn to be ceased.

There is no calm in the Middle East.

Days may as well be dark there. There is nothing like clefts of flash grenades to snap you back to reality.

Death toll rises. High-rises bow to airstrikes out there.

When fighter jets levitate,,no matter the spewn body parts predicted beyond descension, still they rise. Oh the cacophony, the crescendo when they fall.

And the people who scatter. And their limbs. And the buildings caving them in.

The melody of murder in sync with the rumbling of their world.

How it echoes. Bats can hear it.

How it quakes the ground. Sizeable reservoirs of newly discovered oil and natural gas wealth, that the occupied Palestinian territory lies above, can hear it.

The rest of the world can see the buildings; how they are becoming roads of rubble. And the people, and their pain.

Palestine is swinging to the breeze of a spell they know as their nakba, or “catastrophe”. What an enchantment!

Everything is shaking out there.

All day fighter jets roar overhead with aerial bombardments.

People are shaking too. They are afraid. So is the land. You can see in how it quivers when skyscrapers crumble to the ground. It's too loud out there.

When will violence sleep in the Middle East?

Palestine has caught the stubborn flames.

It isn't everyday that you sit in front of a grocery store and suddenly there’s a missile.

At any moment, your home might become your grave.

It is all in how, when launched, rockets behave.

Their flight-to-light demeanour is synonymous with a moth to a light, to a flame.

Palestinians ought to be stopping, dropping and rolling.

A family was laughing, filling sacks of straw and suddenly, a rocket seeked a needle in a haystack. Their bodies were a haystack, set alight and torn to pieces.

The needle is their nakba. The needle is the land they were forced to flee in the 1948 Palestinian exodus.

Everything around them caught fire.

Like how black bodies catch police bullets, rubber or lead, knees to the head. Like how women’s bodies clench flames at the hands of their lovers, of strange men. How they are found hung on trees. Queer bodies disregarded all the same.

The world is eating at itself.

How can violence sleep while rockets whizz in the Israel, Palestine air?

The more things change in the Middle East, the bloodier they get.

Blood of the departed washes against the sun, eastward to the Dead Sea.

Perhaps violence will sleep when Palestine snuggles at the seabed of the northern half of the western shore of the Dead Sea.

The Saturday Star

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