"A Girl from Jerusalem
After trees hid me for a thousand centuries in their fruits' pits, I played on the domes near the heart, I leaped through city squares like a grasshopper free in deserted fields, hills shimmering in my eyes, crossing ages with the legendary joy of an ordinary child's madness, unpuzzled by time or strange armies.
I'm reincarnated in every girl who's drawn the world with the chalk of city stones, I was that girl playing mom on the walls, guarding her kids from cold, nothing clutched my little heart. This was before news was invented, and I learned that the holy is bitter or my huse is coveted by Earth's great civilizations. I was inhabited by souls of love, opened my arms to anyone who wanted to pray where the earth is closest to God. Ii wasn't naive, embracing them, declaring my city their city. They didn't fathom my metaphors. They surrounded me in a narrow corner of the old wall. And when they invented a weapon, they tried it out on my heart.
As if descending from windfields, they came, without features like mine, without fingerprints on walls and streets, they wounded the sand and mountains, wounded the springs, dried up places' memories, held the corpse of a boy who knew nothing of their catastrophe, and I stayed to tell of my Nakba. No one hears. Escaping through green fields, filled with tears, no one hears.
A happy girl, knowing nothing of history's nightmare, I said, I won't harm anyone, no one'll harm me. That's how happy children think. How did the pretty night turn into a horror story, a monster, the bulldozer's teeth ripping remnants of old dreams—what does the word enemies mean? I had no enemy but the sleep that stopped me embracing the expanse. But I still collect my grandma's tales in the heart bag, dry the reeds. Children most love the stories accompanied by flute.
I look on this city from the city, on this country from the country. I look on all those who died, whose souls rolled here, who knew, having been eaten by ends, that the night takes its time then passes, that the day takes its time then passes. Don't tell anyone but they locked themselves in my house. They left me out in the wind's insanity. I knocked on the door till my hands bled, and no one opened it. God, how did they get there, and me here?
They won't tell you I built these temples where they worship God, these walls guarding humanity from falling, these songs to balance the world, these dances to conjure rain and ripen fruits. With each summer that passes through my narrow neighborhood I come of age, I build my house within me, I carry it when they hit me in the guts, separating me from me. I will remind my children of the massacre and the vines that shamed the desert. I will loosen my colorful ribbons. I will fasten them about the city's waist forever."
—Khaled Juma in: You Must Live (tr & ed Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor, 2025)
"The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee."
—Christopher Hitchens via @sardonicus.eu
"This has also been going on without reprieve in Elgin, Aurora, and other Chicago suburbs."
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