By a donkey – patchy-haired ‘n ragged-hoofed – were they pulled along the road, the breaking wheels of the cart bent-in by rubble; grey with dust; redblack with blood. The pregnant woman, Mariam, could not feel her nearly-active labour, distracted as she was by the horror of the fractured bones of the neighbourhood. Yossef, with a hand reaching back to hold the shoulder of his weeping wife, hit the donkey’s hind with the branch of an olive tree they had found burnt ‘n uprooted. Though he knew the distraught creature carried pain just as they did; though he knew the animal pulled them as burden with all its strength – in spite of this, what else could Yossef do as the warplanes scorched the Gazan sky while Israel’s snipers camped in the carrion of people’s homes?
“Mariam?”
To her husband’s imploration, she responded with her hand on his. Her other kept vigil over the child.
In the womb of the woman, unaware of the world, the boy-child strained ‘n struggled. He had felt the convulsions of his parent’s movements through their days of flight ‘n persecution, wandering Dawlat Filastin to find a birthplace home. They had meant for the town Bayt a-Lahum, to the west where the Jordan runs. Occupied by brutish evil, they turned from the river to the distant sea.
As she gazed at the patterns that sang her people’s song across her pregnant belly, Mariam was torn by a wrenching cry as the cart slowed to a stop. Yossef looked upon the ruin of the hospital, its shattered form all fallen. Harrowing moans; weeping cries; panicked calls… As he stepped in shock onto the courtyard, the donkey dropping to its knackered knees, the desperate almost-father faltered at the sight of such suffering.
In heaps ‘n craters, th’place of healing bled its steel ‘n stone. The limbs of covered human beings, limp, reached out in vain. Frantic, th’young ‘n old clutched ‘n clasped at the bodies of their sisters, brothers, children, newborns, fathers, mothers, aunties, uncles, friends, colleagues, mother’s fathers, father’s mothers – the loved; the taken.
“Yossef!”
Mariam lowered her body from off the cart onto the ground, groaning at her own physical pain; groaning at her home’s spiritual pain. Her husband caught her as she sank at the sight, as the sun set b’yond the water.
…….
Under the solemn stars, who wept their ancient light for Palestine, Yossef ‘n Mariam knelt, huddled by a makeshift fire. The gathered people sat, their backs to the bodies in the white-bag shrouds, all silent as they shared what little food had been collected. In a crate beside the woman (now a mother), bundled in a keffiyeh, a boy of only hours old looked up into a sky sat framed by the jagged silhouettes of the surrounding buildings. He had cried; had slept; had fed. By the hands of these, whose families were martyred, his family was saved – so now his mother knew the name to give him.
“Yesh’wa…”
Anointed…
Anointed by the fallen tears, the blood, massacred souls, the stolen lives, the undiminished strength, the e’er undying hope, the blazing fight, righteous ferocity, the beauty, the embroidery, the dancing, the unbroken roots, the Filastin’yun soul – his people at his birth within his homeland.
Image credit – Baldwin
william altoft 