A Piece of Poetry

... what more needs to be said?

A Poem by Fadwa Tuqan

I sit down to write...

But, what it is that I can write?

That it is worth to say 'my homeland'

'My people'

'My people'

Will it be that I can protect my people with words?

Will it be that with words I will save my people?

By chance perhaps is it not absolutely ridicule, for me to sit, today, to write?

That the bullet cries out, and silences the penalty.

Not hardly that it should, the penalty does not have to keep silent,

It must simply say that Palestine during the last thousand and six hundred years was not waiting as an empty and vacated property.

"A piece of poetry inspired by fact. These words, written in another form, had been found in the agenda of a Palestinian guerrilla who died in 1967."