Page 72 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
P. 72
!
as the soldier spreads his matchstick legs apart
an animal fear awakened in the boy of what a predator
might want to crush next,
can we just take a moment
to ask: if this boy somehow
lives, what will his legs have to carry
as they grow and the hair on them
thickens to barbed wire?
what weight will he lift each time he walks?
Notes:
Palestinian children face a profound threat every single day that they live under Israeli military
occupation. Soldiers, many of them only a few years away from their own boyhood and steeped
in increasingly vitriolic anti-Palestinian rhetoric and deep fear of the other, patrol their
neighborhoods, stand by idle or participate as extremist settlers taunt and harass the children
on their way to school, and often engage with Palestinian children with ferocious violence.
Israeli laws are constantly being changed to allow for the detention by armed soldiers of
younger and younger children. Palestinian bodies are under constant threat. This violence is
one aspect of an ongoing that Palestinians have endured for decades, a project of
Nakba
erasure that leaves no human being, olive tree, or square meter of land unscathed
!
