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My Period Of Desperation (Degradation)

I thought we were better than this,
the Holocaust wet paint over fresh plaster,
the bloody fluids cleansed, debris and bone raked away.
Then I read a passage in Carolyn Forche’s book,
Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, and everything I knew,
believed I knew, believed in, believed about me,
my people’s history, scattered like the flight of pigeons before a hawk.
You try to ignore it, but a scab does not form nor a scar,
just an everyday breaking of flesh, a reopening of wounds.
There are not enough stitches in the world to keep all of it intact—
so you give in (I gave in) and the pursuit to truth begins:

1.
I am human first, Judaism my religion—
not my ethnicity, my skin color, my nationality.
I never saw myself a Zionist, but I was proud of Israel,
her history my history, a piece of my identity,
a rendering of facts, the rule of Torah.
You sleep and when you wake, there is power to a myth.

2.
To the victor goes the writing of history,
the rewriting, even a creation of fiction.
1948: The famous Israeli War of Independence
and truths associated with it covered up.
What did happen to the Palestinian people?
The indigenous people? How did their villages vanish?
Were they destroyed in fire and bomb or simply
stolen from them and made a gift to someone else?

3.
There are always “ifs” in a rendering of history
and many sides to the same tale, even the same fiction.
The atrocities of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict—
The Nakba—have been documented, photographed,
displayed and archived—and still
the great myth of Israel’s beginnings persist--

By Michael Brownstein

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January 2017

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