revenge

I about cried when I read this in the newspaper yesterday. It's written by Taha Muhammad Ali, a Palestinian who fled from Galilee to Lebanon with his family in 1948, when their village came under heavy bombardment during the Israeli-Arab war. He slipped back across the border a year later, and now lives in Nazareth, where he writes poetry and runs a souvenir shop.

 

REVENGE

By Taha Muhammad Ali

 

At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I'd rest at last,
and if I were ready —
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who'd put
his right hand over
the heart's place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they'd set —
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn't bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.

Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school...
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own —
cut off like a branch from a tree —
without mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I'd add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness —
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I'd be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street — as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

 

 

The paper notes that when he read his poem at the Dodge Poetry Festival in The Highlands of New Jersey, a crowd of 2,000 spontaneously rose to its feet and started applauding, and "when the time came for it to taper down, it didn't. We clapped on and on, as if we wished the sounds of our hands could carry the spirit of this man and the power of poetry out beyond Waterloo Village and into a fractured world."

 

The columnist notes: "I thought to myself, not for the first time, that art may save us yet."