By Sara Walid El-Araj

Apart yet roots deeply tied
At home yet displaced
Families separated, dispersed
Since 1948

Her figs and her ancient olive trees
The pebbles in her Holy streets
The sweet taste of Yaffa’s oranges
Mejdoul dates and stuffed grape vine leaves

The mother of faiths
Mosques and Churches alike
Hand in hand, they love and they feel
She gave birth to the likes of Darwish
And Edward Said

Her thobes and her Kuffeye
Shes black and shes white
Shes all kinds of colour
so beautifully embroided, so beautifully bright

She’s stunning
Culture so wholesome
She’s had poems written about her
And songs sung for her freedom

The home to the Dome
So rich, So golden
Her strong yet soft features,
she looks alike no-one
Where if rocks could speak they’d speak
Of her beauty on land and her sapphire seas

She’s been stripped,
A strip in the Middle East
She holds on all alone to her history
Replaced and aggressively stolen
Rewritten, rearranged, lost identities
Buried
But never forgotten!

Oh African neighbour she feels when you plead
She feels the same suffering that you feel when you bleed,
when they kneel on our necks,
when we cant live,
we cant breathe
A burden in her own home
They want her so badly to disappear
To go anywhere
To Just leave

chained her, displaced her
mistreated and disgraced
I dare you to ask her, with all her pain
she’ll still tell you her real name

Home is my homeland
Home is what I long to see
Im home in my own skin
Its beige, brown, olive tones
That tell me where my ancestors have been

She taught me at a long distance
the mother tongue arabic that I speak
Home is my homeland
She is deeply missing from me

She breeds
Breeds again
Til freed
Home is Filisteen.

Sara Walid El-Araj
July 2020, London
British on Paper, Palestinian by Nature