The Abandoned Village

Your silent heart sleeps quietly with the evening in the village..
What stillness occupies the space? shackles the depths?
What orphaned melody do the sparrows of the valley repeat? and the nightingales of the forest?
What monotonous tune freezes you, freezes the life within you, and drives you along a single track?
Into what depth does the wide world, yearning to solve its riddles, plunge you forever?
What fathomless emptiness settles in the depths of your soul? and all but exiles you from yourself in its flood....

Yesterday our villages were a dancing melody the ear never tired of hearing.. in them was song, in them spring, in them contentment..
Yesterday our villages — the green vine trellises adorned their fields..
draped their highlands; in the depths of souls their spring was forever being born...
Yesterday our villages were an eternal smile on the lips of the mountains racing one another, with the sky laughing in silence...
Yesterday were their feast days, life dancing in the eyes of the young men and the maidens.
Yesterday we saw the feast day in the village as a singular day, all but standing outside the bounds of time. Is it a halo of light, of gladness, of an obscure rapture that wraps you and floods your whole soul? Of a strange fragrance that creates

newness, that creates distant longing out of the depths of your being?
Hearts are full — gently now — with the chokings of memory..
Lips laugh in mockery at the tragedy of time, a sallow laugh at the darkness of the nights, at the decree of fate that was sealed..
imposed by sinful, red, criminal hands..
Eyes are clouded — far be it! — with the tear of rapture and joy..
Tears from the flood of blazing, raging pain that weeps for itself, fed by the cackles of memory folded away in the depths of the soul in fold upon fold..
The voices of the dread bells repeat with reverence the melodies of the death that hangs over my village..
They call out in awe to the departing youth, with hearts turned to stone in which love has frozen, to mourn itself...

This emigration, O children of my people, sucks away our existence and strangles the life latent within us little by little.
This deceiving, dancing hope, colored in a thousand and one colors, steals like a thief the minds of the young and freezes within its folds every possibility of struggle and work in the soil of the homeland.
This woodworm crouching in the tree of life in my land..
Crush it before it spreads to the roots and leaves strewn on the field the torn limbs of the greenery bursting forth in our great tree..
Strangle it, for soon there will appear on the shores of our souls drops of blood boiling up from the heart of our shattered hearts...

Kfeir — Nabila Kahil