Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Palesraeli Poetry

or 

Profane Poems in the Promised Land;
Sacred Verse in the Cursed Center

July-August 2015
by Quincy Saul




















* * * * *


The serenity of apartheid
The obscenity of the sunrise
The holiness of land
The conscience of sand.


The sun is rising over Gaza
Pouring life and death like lava
From destiny's molten core,
A volcano to implore:
The heavens to redeem the earth,
To promise love to every birth.
The soil to redeem the sky
To promise peace to all who die.


In dreamless sleep the world is one
Oh sunrise let thy will be done.



* * * * *


You only know what you can see:
Thus the sunlight teases thee.
You can only see what you already know:
Thus the moonlight comes and goes.


But your secret is awakening
As water makes the desert sing:
So you can see more than you know
Even as the blossom grows,
So you can know more than you see,
Even as you can know me.



* * * * *


Apartheid is as apartheid does:
Burning children; beachside love.
Apartheid does as apartheid is:
Takes away all that it gives.



* * * * *


Will deep dry heat burn up the lies
Or bake them into hardened pies
Which generations will consume
And in digestion meet their doom?


Death and destroyers they become
Of the present, past and still to come.


Will the searing sun redeem
The silky silence of their victims' screams?
Will the blazing sky reveal
The soil's wound, that it may heal?


Or will every day conceal
The blooming desert of the real?


Will there ever come a time
When Israel loves Palestine?
What God or Devil, Heaven or Hell
Could love or hold thee, Israel?



* * * * *


Write a poem on a leaf,
Put your sword back in its sheath
And write a song to raise the dead;
As above, so beneath.


Though peace and justice call for rage,
Take a leaf from nature's page,
And write a rhyme for the growing green.
If you must burn then burn like sage:


Write a poem on the sky
So all the land can read your cry
As beneath, so above:
Raise the living, ask them why!



* * * * *


Everything under the sun has been named
But meaning is wild and can't be tamed:


Gaza like a bomb between the lips
Jenin like a fuse between fingertips
Ramallah like a patient moon
Nablus like a mountain of fire, soon.


Tel Aviv like a petulant child,
Jerusalem like faith gone wild,
Haifa like a dream gone wrong,
Jaffa like a broken song.


Israel like the wages of crime
Only redeemable in Palestine.



* * * * *


Is this the midwest or the middle east?
Fields of wheat, but without yeast,
Combine harvesters, power lines,
Stolen land and hidden crimes.



* * * * *


The emptiness of thought
Where everything is bought
The emptiness of soul
Where everything is sold
The emptiness of faith
The spiritual disgrace
When the land of milk and honey
Is ransomed for money.


(Arriving at the Jerusalem Bus Station)



* * * * *


(Jerusalem 1)

Does greatness rub off
The stones worn soft?
Do prayers rub in
Streets steeped in sin?
How much blood spilled?
How many spirits filled?
How much truth
And how much proof?
How much deceit
And how much belief?


How much pain and how much love?
Enough to fill the skies above,
How much grace and how much grief?
Enough to fill the ground beneath.
Enough still to come and enough left behind
To stagger any heart or mind.



* * * * *


(Jerusalem 2)

Here is the church and here is the steeple
And its single God for every people.
Here is the mosque and its call to prayer
To one God and one Prophet in the believers' care.
Here was the temple and here is the wall,
And the chosen people whose one God rules all.


Here is the stone and here is the sky,
Here is the present flying by.
Here is the dream and here is the faith,
Here is the prophecy, here is the grace.


Here is the hatred and here is the hurt,
Here is the pestilence, here is the dirt.


Here the convergence of ancient glories
Here the crossroads of modern stories.
Here the calling of what's to come,
Here the befalling of what's to be done.


And here is just another place
Another dream of the human race,
Here is a city cursed to be first
In the hearts of the best and the hopes of the worst.


Here is a city whose time will pass,
Here is the topsoil for the next world's grass.



* * * * *


(Jerusalem 3)

A city that feels like a final breath
Suspended, sustained in dynamic depth,
A city devoted to death, which lives,
A city that like any other gives us
Shelter and purpose and memory,
Prey to conquest and tyranny,
Fertile in chance and destiny.


A city devoted to death, which lives
Like water passing through a sieve:
Is the city the sieve or the water?
Which is hatred, which is honor?
What remains after all this time?
Law or crime? Beauty or grime? Poison or wine?


A city devoted to life, which dies
In the clash of profit and power and pride.
A city of dreams which wakes up and dies in
Apartheid walls upon the horizon.
A city that shines like a beacon of prayer
Trapped in a snare! Beware of its bite! Prepare for a fight!
A city devoted to life, which dies
In the occupation of Palestine.


A city, murdered symbol of unity,
Calling for mass and momentous mutiny
Against the world which has wrought it this way,
And for the world of peace for which it prays.


A city immortal in spiritual depth
Yet a city that feels like a final breath.


(If it doesn't succumb to its demons of slaughter
The sun will dry up all the water.)



* * * * *



(Jerusalem 4: Al-Haram Ash-Sharif)
  
The center of this world,
Where it started, where it ends,
The magnetic north of truth,
Where it hardens, where it bends.


Where souls shall be weighed,
Where prophets ascend,
Where sacrifice is measured,
Where judgement descends.


The throne of God
The primordial clay
Rapture night
Resurrection day.


Where kings are remembered,
Where the covenant's kept,
Where God is dismembered,
Where the son of God leapt.


Where Jesus committed his one act of violence
For which he was crucified:
Where the son of God fought the rule of money,
The living cause for which he died.


Where David and Solomon ruled and judged,
Where Abraham's son escaped sacrifice,
Where Mohamad alighted from a winged horse
And where he ascended to paradise.


Where empires pray,
Where crusaders slay,
Where pilgrims converge,
Live and die for the Word.


Where the Temple of the Chain
Failed to separate wrong from right,
Where all believers stake a claim
And sing, and shout, and kneel, and fight.


Where Mercy's Gate is closed,
Where soldiers guard its doors,
Where the poors await the Messiah
And the Messiah awaits the poors.


Where apocalypse will dawn
On cypress and olive trees.
Where revelation beckons,
Where birds come and go as they please.


Where Mercy's Gate is locked
Where the Messiah cannot enter
Where the path to peace is blocked:
The cursed and blessed center.



* * * * *


(Mount of Temptation)

To seek refuge in a desert cave
From a world of empire, sin and slaves,
To search for what's beyond the grave,
To burn for truth in the sun's sharp rays...


To meet the devil face to face,
To conquer hunger and pride and power
With grace at the hardest and darkest hour,


To fight Word with Word in delirious silence,
And to convert God to love from violence!
To distill from the simmering end of a world
The wisdom of newborn boys and girls.


To forge a legend of temptation
In the boiling sun's ablation
To inspire a thousand nations!


From the universal refuge of desert caves –
Carved by destiny's standing waves –
As beacons to a world of slaves
To meet your fears – be not afraid!
Of Self or State or God or Grave!
Fix your eyes on the horizon's blade:
This is the lesson that Jericho gave
A slave who defied himself and his tribe
And met the devil on its mountainside
To free himself from doubt and fear
Until he could speak to those who could hear
Of a destiny drawing near:


Of people from money and empire saved,
And of paradise gained because we forgave.
If this is what you love and crave,
Seek the refuge of desert caves!


Because love has not yet conquered hate
Because the holy city has imperial gates
Because money and empire rule the race
Go meet the devil face to face
And conquer him with love and grace.



* * * * * 



Jaffa Poems

(by Kanya D'Almeida and Quincy Saul)

* * * * *


Chessmen are limited but their choices are infinite
A lifetime in a game
Win or lose.
Existence in a box, movement on a square,
What's there?
In the ranks of the opposing color?
Some other
“Do or die” extremists
In the mists?

People are infinite but their choices are limited
A game for a lifetime
Win or lose.
Existence in a state, movement within borders,
Who gives the orders?
Where fate is decided beyond the horizon
Who dies and who lives
In the mists?
















* * * * *

We are reptilian
Slithering forth into life
Calculating, pulsating
Wanting water, needing land
Laying our eggs in the sand
Striking at night, thoughtful and slow
Never letting go
Until our prey is limp
Drained and dead
And our mouths are red.

We are spirits
Shining through into life
Soaring
Roaring
Wanting work, needing love
Hoping for help from above
Dreaming at night, thoughtful and slow
Always letting go
Until we become food
For worms and roses
And the eye closes
And the sky opens.




Seven Pillars of Wisdom


Selections for 21st Century Conditions, from
SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM: A TRIUMPH by T.E. LAWRENCE [of Arabia]
DE LUXE EDITION, 1938, GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO.

selections and italics by QMS















Rebellion was the gravest step which political men could take, and the success or failure of the Arab revolt was a gamble too hazardous for prophecy. Yet, for once, fortune favoured the bold player, and the Arab epic tossed up its stormy road from birth through weakness, pain and doubt, to red victory. It was the just end to an adventure which had dared so much, but after the victory there came a slow time of disillusion, and then a night in which the fighting men found that their hopes had failed them. Now, at last, may there have come to them the white peace of the end, in the knowledge that they achieved a deathless thing, a lucent inspiration to the children of their race.” 54

“The Sherif's rebellion had been unsatisfactory for the last few months: (standing still, which , with an irregular war, was the the prelude to disaster): and my suspicion was that its lack was leadership: not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm, that would set the desert on fire.” 67

Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or claim to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to exploit it or its product among others for private benefit. The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.” 84

“Neither Sykes nor Picot had believed the thing really possible; but I knew that it was, and believed that after it the vigour of the Arab Movement would prevent the creation – by us or others – in Western Asia of unduly 'colonial' schemes of exploitation.” 132

It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbors' beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban Semites, merchants and concupiscent men of the world. About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed liked the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in its excess of rightness. Doubtless they must recur so long as the causes – sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and uncumbered minds of the desert-dwellers.” 148

“The first confusion was the false antithesis between strategy, the aim in war, the synoptic regard seeing each part relative to the whole, and tactics, the means towards a strategic end, the particular steps of its staircase. They seemed only points of view from which to ponder the elements of war.
The Algebraical element of things, a Biological element of lives, and the Psychological element of ideas. The algebraical element looked to me a pure science, subject to mathematical law, inhuman. It dealt with known variables, fixed conditions, space and time, inorganic things like hills and climates and railways, with mankind in type-masses too great for individual variety, with all artificial aids and the extensions given our faculties by mathematical invention. It was essentially formulable.
… calculate how many square miles? … And how would the Turks defend all that? No doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we came like an army with banners; but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, in vulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind; and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so might we offer nothing material to the killing.” 192

[about the Turks and Germans] “They would believe that rebellion was absolute like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” 193

[on the art of war, defined by “war philosophers”, based on “the biological factor”; reserves, #s, “effusion of blood”:] “A line of variability, Man, persisted like leaven through its estimates, making them irregular.” 193

“Nine-tenths of tactics were certain enough to be teachable in schools; but the irrational tenth was like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and in it lay the test of generals. It could be ensued only by instinct (sharpened by thought practising the stroke) until at the crisis it came naturally, a reflex.” 193

The decision of what was critical would always be ours. Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves until we attacked... We might turn our average into a rule (not a law, since war was antinomian) and develop a habit of never engaging the enemy.” 194

[on propaganda and preaching] “It was more subtle than tactics, and better worth doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables, with subjects incapable of direct command. It considered the capacity for mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the cultivation of whatever in them promised to profit our intention. We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men's minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of neutral; circle beyond circle... There were many humiliating material limits, but no moral impossibilities; so that the scope of our diathetical activities was unbounded.” 195

“We had nothing material to lose, so our best line was to defend nothing and shoot nothing. Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power. The invention of bully beef had profited us more than the invention of gunpowder, but gave us strategical rather than tactical strength, since in Arabia range was more than force, space greater than the power of armies.” 196

“'What will now happen with this knowledge?' asked Mohammed. 'We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo's; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven.'
'Why are the Westerners always wanting all?' provokingly asked Auda. 'Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions.' 'We want the world's end, Auda.' 'But that is God's,' complained Zaal, half angry. 'And has each the Prophet and heaven and hell?' Auda broke in on him. 'Lads, we know our districts, our camels, our women. The excess and the glory are to God. If the end of wisdom is to add star to star our foolishness is pleasing.” 282

“Jerusalem, was a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohamedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present. Its people, with rare exceptions, were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Ideals of Arab nationality were far from them...” 333

[on Syria and Syrians] “They were discontented always with what government they had; such being their intellectual pride; but few of them honestly thought out a working alternative, and fewer still agreed upon one... Some cried aloud for an Arab kingdom. These were usually Moslems; and the Catholic Christians would counter them by demanding European protection of a thelemic order, conferring privileges without obligation. Both proposals were, of course, far from the hearts of the national groups, who cried for autonomy for Syria, having a knowledge of what autonomy was, but not knowing Syria, for in Arabic there was no such name, nor any name for all the country any of them meant. The verbal poverty of their Rome-borrowed name indicated political disintegration. Between town and town, village and village, family and family, creed and creed, existed intimate jealousies sedulously fostered by the Turks. Time seemed to have proclaimed the impossibility of autonomous union for such a land. In history, Syria had been a corridor between sea and desert, joining Africa to Asia, Arabia to Europe. It had been a prize-ring, a vassal, of Anatolia, of Greece, of Rome, of Egypt, of Arabia, of Persia, of Mesopotamia. When given momentary independence by the weakness of neighbors it had fiercely resolved into discordant northern, southern, eastern and western 'kingdoms'... for if Syria was by nature a vassal country it was also by habit a country of tireless agitation and incessant revolt... The master-key of opinion lay in the common language: where also, lay the key of imagination... Patriotism, ordinarily of soil or race, was warped to a language... A second buttress of a polity of Arab motive was the dim glory of the early Khalifate, whose memory endured among the people... Yet we knew that these were dreams. Arab Government in Syria, thought buttressed on Arab prejudices, would be as much 'imposed' as the Turkish Government, or a foreign protectorate, or the historic Caliphate. Syria remained a vividly coloured racial and religious mosaic. Any wide attempt after unity would make a patched and parcelled thing, ungrateful to a people whose instincts ever returned toward parochial home rule.” 335-6

“Then would come reaction; but only after victory; and for victory everything material and moral might be pawned.” 337

“We should never try to improve an advantage. We should use the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place.” 337

“In a real sense maximum disorder was our equilibrium.” 338

“Any of our Arabs could go home without penalty whenever the conviction failed him: the only contract was honour.” 339

“The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. By this substitution of a sure job for a possible masterpiece, military science made a deliberate sacrifice of capacity in order to reduce the uncertain element, the bionomic factor, in enlisted humanity. Discipline's necessary accompaniment was compound or social war – that form in which the fighting man was the product of the multiplied exertions of a long hierarchy, from workshop to supply unit, which kept him active on the field.
The Arab war should react against this, and be simple and individual. Every enrolled man should serve in the line of battle and be self-contained there. The efficiency of our forces was the personal efficiency of the single man. It seemed to me that, in our articulated war, the sum yielded by single men would at least equal the product of a compound system of the same strength.” 339

“Guerillas must be allowed liberal work room: in irregular war, of two men together, one was being wasted. Our ideal should be to make our battle a series of single combats, our ranks a happy alliance of agile commanders-in-chief.” 340

“We went about in parties, not in stiff formation, and their aeroplanes failed to estimate us. No spies could count us, either, since even ourselves had not the smallest idea of our strength at any given moment. On the other hand, we knew them exactly; each single unit, and every man they moved. They treated us as regulars, and before venturing a move against us calculated the total force could meet them with. We, less orthodox, knew exactly what they would meet us with. “This was our balance. For these years the Arab Movement lived on the exhilarating but slippery tableland between 'could' and 'would'. We allowed no margin for accident: indeed 'no margins' was the Akaba motto, continuously in the mouths of all.” 381

“the civil population of the enemy area was wholly ours without pay or persuasion. In consequence our intelligence service was the widest, fullest and most certain imaginable.” 385

“We underestimated the crippling effect of Allenby's too plentiful artillery, and the cumbrous intricacy of his infantry and cavalry, which moved only with rheumatic slowness.” 385

“Yet I could not explain to Allenby the whole Arab situation, nor disclose the full British plan to Feisal.” 386

[on the revolt of the Arab peasantry] “They could only rise once, and their effort on that occasion must be decisive.” 386

“I weighed the English army in my mind, and could not honestly assure myself of them. The men were often gallant fighters, but their generals as often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.” 386

“The abstraction of the desert landscape cleansed me, and rendered my mind vacant with its superfluous greatness: a greatness achieved not by the addition of thought to its emptiness, but by its subtraction. In the weakness of earth's life was mirrored the strength of heaven, so vast, so beautiful, so strong.” 512

“I explained that we should live on the country. Young thought it a poor country to live on. I called it very good.” 541

“I had been told the theory, could repeat some of it: but it was in my head, and rules of action were only snares of action till they had run out of the empty head into the hands, by use.” 618

“My head was working full speed in these minutes, on our joint behalf, to prevent the fatal first steps by which the unimaginative British, with the best will in the world, usually deprived the acquiescent native of the discipline of responsibility, and created a situation which called for years of agitation and successive reforms and riotings to mend.” 636

“I had studied Barrow and was ready for him. Years before, he had published his confession of faith in Fear as the common people's main incentive to action in war and peace. Now I found fear a mean, overrated motive; no deterrent, and, thought a stimulant, a poisonous stimulant, whose every injection served to consume more of the system to which it was applied. I could have no alliance with his pedant belief of scaring men into heaven... My instinct with the inevitable was to provoke it.” 636

“Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest.
Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal's sorry duty would be to rid himself of his war-friends, and replace them by those elements which had been most useful to the Turkish Government...
Quickly they collected the nucleus of a staff, and plunged ahead as a team. History told us the steps were humdrum: appointments, offices and departmental routine. First the police. A commandant and assistants were chosen: districts allotted: provisional wages, indents, uniform, responsibilities. The machine began to function.” 649

“anyone who pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their masters must come out of it so strained in estimation that afterward nothing in the world would make him feel clean.” 659

“We took Damascus, and I feared. More than three arbitrary days would have quickened in me a root of authority. There remained historical ambition, insubstantial as a motive by itself. I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us. Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad; and then there was Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort.” 661