Parable of a Father

Photo: Jerusalem Post – 2015

 

An ordinary Palestinian father, stripped to his waist,
and bleeding, carries in his arms a wounded Israeli soldier,
back to the front lines, where the disbelieving eyes
behind a hundred rifles watch and stare.

A blemish appears upon the polished plans of war.
A crack opens in the concrete runways of revenge.
Suddenly, the bombs are undependable; and doubtable,
are the drones of death.

The tonnages of explosives.
The math of missiles.
The arithmetic of body count.
The grid of bloodshed.
Have clay feet, and contain the seed
of their own destruction.

The father’s love for another father’s son is inscrutable
to the rational ratios and sovereign strategies of war.
The free act is a gap in the absolute mimicry of combat,
a flaw in the machinery of hate and vengeance,

and is where the beauty lies,
and is where the life grows,
and is where the river of light, flows.

The father must be shot, the event covered up,
or all peace will break out.

 

14 Comments

  1. Thanks for this powerful image of an empathic father in the face of the war machine. “There is a crack where the light gets in”….if only.

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