By Francis Oeser

(For Ramzy Baroud & Nahida Izzat)

In Nagasaki all the clocks stopped at 11.02.

Today, folk are still dying –

a long time for the vast disintegration

caused by mankind’s cruelty in 1945.
 

Now, Nagasaki, rebuilt, gleaming and busy

shows few signs of the carnage.

Nature and memory quietly bury ruins.
 

No one buries ruined Biet Daras.

And, now that Mohammed Baroud lies

with his son under Gaza earth –

all the others too –

now they are gone, those who could remember,

who will mourn our terrible loss

as nature and memory are cruelly buried

by strangers’ bull dozers and foreign distortions?
 

I am well-built, without much blemish.

So are my children (but beautiful!).

You, who look away

preoccupied and embarrassed,

must see our scars

from so careless a world

of bombs and lies!
 

Although the clocks stopped in Palestine in 1948,

the world will go there with new clocks,

throng there with renewed dreams.

Then, villages will be rebuilt, fields planted

because, otherwise, every single one of us

(we’re not islands) will slowly perish,

crumbling into Nagasaki dust.

– Francis Oeser is a novelist and a poet. He contributed this poem to PalestineChronicle.com.