#PoeticLicence | They do not want your land of milk and honey in Jerusalem #IsraelPalistine

Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet and journalist

Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet and journalist

Published May 19, 2018

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People will say you are an artist.

How you draw your automatic firearm.

The trigger: like a half moon, when pulled back

It changes the seasons.

A hailstorm winter of bullets. A tsunami summer of mothers crying.

Autumn leaves of 60 bodies falling near the Israel-Gaza border.

Life sources springing out the skins of 2400 people wounded, wilted, crumbling.

What quarrel does a flung stone have with a flying projectile?

People will say you are an artist.

How you paint Palestine red with blood.

You dip your paintbrush into their souls.

Stroke the ground with their humanity on which you trample on.

They do not want your land of milk and honey in Jerusalem.

Their embassy in Tel Aviv is enough cows and bees for them.

Your canvas is their soil.

Solidarity and prayer will not save them.

Their children’s creams blowing through the open windows.

It isn’t safe in their father’s houses either.

If not destined to die in the streets themselves, the little girls learn how to be widows.

But these houses are where their fathers were born.

What love could be is a lesson learned in kitchens where their mothers cooked meals.

In the same houses these girls were also born and mastered loving their brothers.

But the thing about affection is that heartaches are too tough to chew.

These siblings will die one after the other like hummingbirds that wished to grow to be eagle and hawks.

So shoot their parents anywhere else, but not in these houses.

People will say you are an artist.

How you peddle whittled wooden angels that you are trying to sell to them.

But these hummingbirds could never sprout a bigger set of wings on their spines.

Shed their scales and grow halos.

Their nest is falling.

When it hits the ground dust will rise.

A seismic shift will take place because a people have fallen.

This nest is the houses and the young will be eaten by hounds.

These hounds are Israeli artists. They draw automatic firearms.

Paint Palestine red with blood. Whittle wooden angels as a campus to a land of milk and honey.

But this art is abstract. Nothing is as it seems.

A people is slowly scattered, stitches on ties that bind them uprooted and untangled at the seams.

The fabric of their being is being stonewashed and dismantled.

These souls are a mirage of an army of nomad snowmen in the Kalahari.

They are in limbo, melting and inside an hourglass, they are trapped in apartheid.

South Africa, we have been here before.

Violated. Our human rights dragged below animals in the food chain.

Subhumans.

We threw stones against guns too.

It's no wonder we leaped, our ambassador to Israel in protest we withdrew.

I pray your future will not be marred with innuendos that your deaths were not enough to justify your struggle being called a crime against humanity.

When this happens, I hope it doesn’t deter you.

Who decided that the libra scale of crimes against humanity tips on the side with more deaths?

AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel insists the UN was wrong to call apartheid a crime against humanity.

By association, the Palestinian plight isn’t one either.

Not enough people have been killed yet.

Only people behind a gun will think their compatriots are artists.

@Rabbie_Wrote

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