Stolen
a poem
Listen to an audio recording of Stolen:
First THEY stole the people’s land, their towns and villages, their houses and buildings, their possessions and money, their farms and animals, their shops and businesses. What THEY didn’t steal, THEY razed to the ground, burnt, destroyed, desecrated. Then THEY expelled thousands from THEIR stolen country, drove them across invisible borders, or herded them into camps, squeezed and crowded them onto strips of sand and rock, fenced and confined them so that they could never pass or leave without THEIR permission. Over decades, THEY have stolen their freedom with abduction, arrest, imprisonment, torture, and summary execution. THEY have stolen their independence and every glimmer of self-determination through betrayal, false negotiations, broken promises, one-sided deals, expanding illegal settlements, the violence of bullets, bombs and bulldozers. Through war and terror, THEY have stolen the lives of their sons and daughters, their fathers and husbands, their mothers and wives. their teachers, their doctors, their poets, their leaders. THEY have stolen their history, and buried it under THEIR fictions. Now, in this unending war THEY are stealing the last of what little remains of their ancestral land. THEY are stealing their food, stealing their water, stealing their fuel, stealing their medicine, stealing the toxic ground beneath their bare feet. THEY are stealing their privacy, THEY are stealing their dignity, THEY are stealing their sleep, THEY are stealing their dreams, THEY are stealing their future. What more can there be for THEM to steal before THEY have satiated THEIR greed, THEIR lust THEIR covetousness and envy? The gold in the people’s teeth, The organs in their withered bodies, The blood in their thin veins, The skin on their brittle bones, Their indomitable spirits, Their immortal souls?
Diane, thank you so much for sharing this immensely poignant poem.
With incredible clarity and grace, you have managed to beautifully summarize our Palestinian painful history since Nakba while holding a mirror to our present moment.
This is an amazing and resonant piece of work.
Thank you once more for your beautiful presence in our world, you make it a much better place than it truly is.
Salute from the hurt yet beautiful Gaza.
"What more can there be
for THEM to steal
before THEY have satiated
THEIR greed, THEIR lust
THEIR covetousness and envy?"
Just one last thing, and they've been assiduously, relentlessly working on it, total erasure of any hint of Palestinian existence in the human record.
And this from a pseudo-country illegitimately created by the UN, and allowed to exist within that body, despite the full gamut of violations of conditions to do so.