The Cemetery of Conscience
Appeared in Fikra Magazine, 21 March 2024
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?