Photographer: Mahmoud Abu Hamda. Check his FB page here.
https://www.facebook.com/Mahmoud.Abu.Hamda
click any photot, then click right/left arrow to see Pics in their original size.
Gaza Photo Gallery 5
3
Author Archives: This Is Gaza
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 20,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals
Freshly Baked Souls
As fire balls and sparks descend,
And the little ones rejoice,
Look up, and cheer, unable to comprehend,
Sooner than they expect
They will be blown
(It’s none of their wishes
If only they had known!)
And more freshly grilled balls of flesh ascend.
And fall on full dishes
And fill the boxes.
And the hollow minds.
The full bellies.
They look down. Rejoice. Cheer.
“Freshly baked!”
“Freshly baked!”
“Who wants freshly baked flesh for breakfast?”
“Throw me a piece. “
“Throw me four.
I have just eaten but crave for more.”
***
The hearts are not hearts.
The eyes can’t see
There are no eyes there
The bellies craving for more
A house destroyed except for the door
The family, all of them, gone
Save a photo album
That has to be buried with them
No one was left to cherish the memories
No one.
Except freshly baked souls in bellies.
Except for a poem .
I am You
Two steps: one, two.
Look in the mirror:
The horror, the horror!
The butt of your M-16 on my cheekbone
The yellow patch it left
The bullet-shaped scar expanding
Like a swastika,
Snaking across my face,
The heartache flowing
Out of my eyes dripping
Out of my nostrils piercing
My ears flooding
The place.
Like it did to you
70 years ago
Or so.
***
I am just you.
I am your past haunting
Your present and your future.
I strive like you did.
I fight like you did.
I resist like you resisted
And for a moment,
I’d take your tenacity
As a model,
Were you not holding
The barrel of the gun
Between my bleeding
Eyes.
***
One. Two.
The very same gun
The very same bullet
That had killed your Mom
And killed your Dad
Is being used,
Against me,
By you.
***
Mark this bullet and mark in your gun.
If you sniff it, it has your and my blood.
It has my present and your past.
It has my present.
It has your future.
That’s why we are twins,
Same life track
Same weapon
Same suffering
Same facial expressions drawn
On the face of the killer,
Same everything
Except that in your case
The victim has evolved, backward,
Into a victimizer.
I tell you.
I am you.
Except that I am not the you of now.
***
I do not hate you.
I want to help you stop hating
And killing me.
I tell you:
The noise of your machine gun
Renders you deaf
The smell of the powder
Beats that of my blood.
The sparks disfigure
My facial expressions.
Would you stop shooting?
For a moment?
Would you?
***
All you have to do
Is close your eyes
(Seeing these days
Blinds our hearts.)
Close your eyes, tightly
So that you can see
In your mind’s eye.
Then look into the mirror.
One. Two.
I am you.
I am your past.
And killing me,
You kill you.
Picking Olives in Gaza
Click on any picture and then click on right or left arrow to see other pictures
O’Live Tree
O, beat me more.
Hit me with your sticks;
Step on my leaves
Smother my twigs under your boots
Like how you always do.
The beating I bear;
The humiliation, I do not care
But take me not,
Steal me not.
Even if I burn,
Here I belong
And to them I shall return.
***
If you hear my talk,
You may feel my pain
But you belong not here:
You do not even know
How to touch me,
How to gently squeeze me,
How to hug me,
How to wipe off the dust,
When I am ripe,
And when I am not,
When I need water,
And when I do not,
And how to pick me
Like how they always do.
***
Your smell and heavy boots
And the metal on your backs
And your metal bars!
For God’s sakes who on earth olives picks
With metal bars for sticks?
***
But I ramble again.
Because you won’t understand
And if you understood me,
You would not, in the first place,
Be here.
***
You come and go.
I see you once or twice a year
With either flames or sticks
And I weep for the rest of the year.
But one day
My twigs shall grow,
The oil shall flow,
My people shall glow,
And you, you will go.
Gaza Gallery III: Grapes and SunFlowers
Perhaps I have finally come to fathom why zionists have usually favoured the Palestinians-are-reptiles metaphor. No matter how mighty Israel’s blows, the never kill the Palestinians spirit of regeneration. Seeing the Palestinians it killed and the lands it brutally razed, Israel must be in pain, real pain, over the fact that Palestinains always, always, rise up from the ashes of Israeling blazing fires and the abyss it keeps throwing us into. One more thing, Israel, people have already, defying your racist narratives, started to use the simile ‘like a Palestinian’ to connote perseverance and persistence.
This is Beit Lahia, North Gaza. I lost count of how many times Israel uproots fields and destroyed greenhouses or how many farmers it killed. The Photos speak for themselves.
Pictures are all courtesy of Amjad El-Agha.
Mom
On Ma’s face
There is a book
And life’s preface.
Between these lines
And in these two caves
Life dwells.
That line is hope.
That one is love.
That death.
When she smiles,
She gives hope,
She gives love,
She gives life,
To life.
When I Stoop
One poem for Mahmoud al-Sarsak, the prisoner who imprisoned his jailer.
The walls of my prison
Whisper to me;
They tell me stories of people who were here
Of people who lived here.
There was the weak
And there was the old.
There was the child.
There was the lady.
They were here,
But now they are there.
***
In my prison, I talk to the walls
And they to me talk
That one day I will walk:
One day my jailer will stoop
At my feet
To unlock the chains.
It does not matter why
But he will stoop.
***
Inside my prison I draw my future
With minute details.
On the other side of the wall
(Behind the bars)
Sits the jailer.
As he turns back
And looks me in the eye,
He pours mountains of boredom
And let’s loose of a sigh.
I look back and smile.
He clears his throat
Blinks once then twice
And moves his lips.
I walk away
And give him my back.
I smile again
Winking at the wall.
‘See,’ it tells me
‘I know,’ I reply,
And bend down
And shake my chains.
The look in his face,
The fear in his eyes
Both make my day.
***
Inside my prison,
I also stoop,
But when I do,
I stoop to conquer.
Gaza Photo Gallery II
When Gaza is not being bombed by israel, this is how it looks like…
Photographer: Taj Saleem
P.S. click on any photo then click the left or right arrow to see other pics in full size.
