The Cemetery of Conscience

Appeared in Fikra Magazine, 21 March 2024

The Cemetery Of Conscience

By Khalil Sima'an

“All changed, changed utterly: 

 A terrible beauty is born”    

  (from Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats) 

I.

There is no more time. No time at all 

for death rites or wailing mothers 

or ambulance sirens wailing 

between the debris and the rubble 

of lives born in The Capitol's


Murder Registers. No roads left 

to evacuate those declared dead 

before ever truly living,

no refuge to shield the perpetual

refugee. No place for burial


rituals. This is the Cemetery


of Slain Conscience and Dignity. 

This yard did not exist on western maps - 

erased years ago – until the sky 

came down at once, raining torrents

of home-made rockets “outa the blue.”

II.


Long before this place was bombed again, 

its name was crossed out in the death notes

of Western undertakers and Western

gamblers wagering on the interest

rates derived from testing new weapons.

This is not the right place to brood 

over gentrified privileges 

or cancelled voyages. No place 

left for the seed of dignity 

to grow. Not an inch for hope to seep 

beneath this prison fence. But children 

break through all fences, they burst out 

of the pores of adolescence 

and nothing, nothing can stop them 

from blazing out of a besieged

childhood and a horizon born dead. 

Behind this seventeen-year-old siege 

a terrible beauty has gone wild.

III.


Tonight the lights went out in Gaza. 

Fathers don’t have to shut the blinds, they

don’t need to tuck in their children 

under blankets of fire and flare 

from the fighter jets above their heads. 

Not a single water drop is left 

to quench the thirst of the elderly


before they die, while handing over 

the rusty keys of hope to the next 

generation. Not one crust of bread 

remains before the “free-world” awakens. 

Here, under the siege of conscience, 

the strangled is denied resistance,


and children born with a death sentence

bury hope before they reach adolescence. 

IV.


And the dead welcome the other dead


in purgatory because they are

stateless and doomed without burial

grounds for children born older than Biden

and children born “terrorists” by birth, 

first name, surname, skin and religion;

Allahu Akbar & The Holy Trinity

Allahu Akbar, I cry out in misery:


Allah, why have you forsaken us?

Alone we battle for life in death,


and alone we battle death in life.


This infant stands alone, and no one

would wipe her tears, and the yellow snot

of the hypocritical “free-world”


from her nose and the scars from her soul, 

and the absent future from her present, 

and hold her in their arms, for a while, 

just hold her fragile hand, for a while. 

V.


The reverse Exodus has begun 

and Moses is not marching along 

into the Cemetery of Conscience,

and the hot air mirages, death skulls 

that line up the road, point at the Nile.

And Egypt has a single Nile,

and the Nile is not a nursing boob

for the stateless and dispossessed.

And I saw one father push a cart


of USA produced misery


and the remains of a family,


another carried a bag soaked in red,

his children’s remains and blood, they said,


once again, the “free-world” looks away;

they brought their remains where two mothers

bury their miscarried unborns, dead

by starvation, killed by medieval siege. 

And a red shirt kid with a parrot


on his shoulder, teaching the parrot

sweet sound bites, like the “self-defense” 

crap and the “free-world.” I honestly

ask you and myself, who will remain


alive to tell the gruesome story 

of  the death of the “free-world” conscience?