Follow the road to the water Jordan.
Follow the road to the water of Jordan.
Gather a bundle of reeds as you walk,
don’t let them fall from your grip.
You’ve never been here while living but your bones remember,
remember a different trek, a millennium ago.
The water doesn’t part for you this time,
will not kill for you again.
It is no longer self-defense.
Wonder how 2000 years has changed you,
Today you are not running from pharaoh killing first-borns
– unrisen bread on your backs.
Jewish babies learn the word diaspora,
of wandering in search of safety,
fleeing the mobs chasing us with pitchforks.
We teach them how to say Shoa, Hebrew for catastrophe.
to see street lights and fear mobs with torches.
Our children learn that trauma runs in our DNA
but not how to exorcise gas chamber ghosts,
or that the living shouldn’t carry the dead.
We talk of ancestors whose deaths were not honored,
but we don’t talk about the holocausts, the genocides,
the Nakbas of other peoples.
I was cast out for telling little ones we are safe, that we have stopped running.
My generation has lungs that heave
but in our lifetime, there has always been enough air.
We never agreed to carry the weight of two thousand years of fear
We are taught about the dying of our people before anyone teaches us how to live.
And we don’t talk about how grief made us feral before,
when we were tired and broken.
How we survived the Final Solution
while still celebrating our Holy Days, Rosh Shannah.
We kept our stories alive.
And yet when a country that didn’t want us either,
offered us an ancient homeland.
We convinced ourselves Palestine was empty, and it wasn’t.
The water knows what we did,
It does not part for us until we make it right
The homeland that birthed us has raised other peoples’ too.
The river knows that today we have been the drowned
and done the drowning.
The evidence lies upon its bottom,
wreckage of cities we bombed.
Lay ourselves down on the rusting bed frames where only death sleeps
Let our feet bleed.
Let our feet fade into the water.
To not remember is a desecration.
Don’t swerve from tree trunks.
These roots will hold you forever.
And isn’t that what we wanted?
Featured image credit: Pixabay.com/AJS1.
