Nazih Khere
IDENTITY
Those who were baptized in the Jordan said:
This is my land!
And those who fell tonight on the bridges said:
This is my land!
And those who wept on the roofs of Jerusalem said: This is my land!
But I
was simply someone who said this is my land.
*
The poets speak in literary evenings
the people speak about artificial relationships
everyone says that our holy land
belongs entirely to our Lord
And then our Lord suddenly appears
in the guise of a fighter on the roofs of Jerusalem
like someone who had crossed the Jordan,
wet from baptism
*
Don't be amazed!
I am the strange contradiction between a thousand opinions
and a thousand lies
in all the splintered fences
I am the contradiction in the balance between the old and the new
the contradiction between the fortune teller and the tale
I always dreamed of being a communist comrade
or an obturate prodigal, slow of understanding
in order to return for a moment that peace to my mind
Then I will be the stranger
and perhaps one who belongs
When I sleep in my Israeli belonging
and wake at times in my Palestinian sorrow
in my Arab distress
and my Druse chagrin
then what do you want me to say,
that these are all my identity?
Let it be so:
But my friend the communist at hearing this
will say to me:
You must read Lenin
to return the peace among your separate selves
or between your self and your God!
Imagine!
My Jewish friend hearing these things
will say to me:
straighten your uniform
without it you'll look
like one of the minorities
or a street worker in Haifa.
And when my bearded friend from Um El-Fachem sees me
(in uniform or not) he will say:
None of you will produce a righteous man -
You will remain a Druse, you will remain a traitor,
even if you soften my wounds in the oil of longing
this is but your atonement for an eternal crime.
And despite all this
I will not hate any one of them
as long as there is within me
that which seeks out my sins
that they may rejoice in failure.
*
Oh the people of the contradiction-filled homeland
where people go out to look at the Gilboa Iris
and then to war,
I will give you my soul as a sacrificial lamb
as I have always been
and my bitter flesh will fill with opiates
I hate to browse in the Arab history books
which assigns people by nations
More than that I despise the Hebrew newspaper
which makes from every new immigrant
a more preferred citizen than me.
Oh the people of the contradiction-filled homeland
when my bitter flesh will fill with opiates
you shall consume me and fall
but I... at my death another woman
will give birth to me
and I will skip from the Carmel mountains to the Shoof Mountains
accompanied by five horseback riders
and five swords
and they will ensure my peace
between the Barada river, the Hermon and the Carmel!
translated
by Karen Alkalay-Gut