From One Mother to Another

After reading the speech to the European Parliament of Israeli peace activist and professor at Hebrew University, Nurit Peled Elhanan, in 2005, about the suffering of Palestinian women, I put my thoughts into this poem that I name:

From One Mother to Another:


She speaks not of muted tongue
Nurit Peled Elhanan:
But in the tongue of many languages
And I hear her loud and clear;
do you?
Or is it Babel all over again?
This time, she speaks to me
The mother, the widow, the sufferer;
In mourning for our lost humanity
And I understand,
So why doesn’t he or she over there?
The megalomaniac who likes to tear my world apart
The megalomaniac who loves racism, fascism and death
deemed appropriate in a peculiar notion of what is right:
A war on terror?
It can only be a war on peace; on motherhood;
On you and me and a child.
And as I quote Nurit Peled Elhanan, when she writes:
“Why does that streak of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?”
I strain
to find
the reason,
… why …?

http://www.socialism.com/whatsnew/iwdaddress.html