NEW FLAME

Flame of a new democracy
Fire of a new nonhierarchy
A fire of the time that comes
The signs of the time are none
of the psychic games or rhetorical frames
we knew before
What comes  is so much more
than the slow awakening we nudge for
The one some fear, some ignore
some defy   and some may even kill for

The lift arise from the core
in every individual being
through the Heavens
and through the Earth
in her awakening
when she shakes her sleep off
and aligns again
with the universe she is drifting in
cleaning herself to live

We are living on her
We are lifting with her
We are each
an individual Earth
aligning itself with the Universe
Each a flame of a new democracy
that unites in a noduality
and peacefull heart
flame

by: Tonie Lunde
tonielunde@yahoo.com

When every word is an ocean
telling a thousand tales
Saying more than over a thousand words
words you have never said

When love is all around you
and tales of love’s been laid
at your feet before you
You always heard what I said

With a handful of words
you paint a thousand lives

by: Tonie Lunde
tonielunde@yahoo.com

REALTIME

You know our peoples stream
Do you know what it means

We know our peoples stream
We know our peoples dream
We know who listen in  We see
We see the stream eternally
We see the dream
We live the peoples dream
We live for all
And the universe will know

by: Tonie Lunde
tonielunde@yahoo.com

NEW LIFE

Higher knowledge pure
and grounded in a child
Or the youth who knows
their one true line inside
Those who remember
because they are let to know
Those who grow up
with freedom and space to know
Those who are met with respect
when they come
by those who will see them grow

Higher knowledge pure
and open with a child
When the parents know
what kids have brought inside
Those who have wisdom
and leave them to know
Those who allow
freedom and space to unfold
for the child in respect
when they come
to those who will see them grow

by: Tonie Lunde
tonielunde@yahoo.com

Too rooted in Earth to be a spy
Too emotional to take a life
Too grounded now   she flies too high
The tears to grow have all been cried

They thought she'd live their lie   and fight for middle ways
She got worse to find than needles in the hays
She became a butterfly   They never die

One who never dies
they seek and therefore have to hide
they weep and that's how they can cry
they feel that's how they stay alive
They may be seen as threats by those who rule with greed or minds
or prefer the comfort of the blind
They must become a butterfly
one who never dies

one who seek their own true line   beyond the lies and middle ways
one who wait   for they have been themselves in hays
one who recognize  when others fly

No net will hold a butterfly
You dust it down it dies
and you won't be around to see it fly
Many have been known to try
before they taught themselves
to be a butterfly

by: Tonie Lunde
tonielunde@yahoo.com

2 poems Dada

A Dada sur les droits de l'homme.pdf    

Requiem pour 2 cons.pdf    

by: Renato Garone

New Mexico

2004 NEWS  A three year old Palestinian boy died from shock after Israeli
forces shelled his neighborhood.

2006 NEWS  Two Arab children playing in Nazareth were killed when
Hezbollah  fired a rocket into Israel.

In 2000, more than 250 Palestinian and 72 Israeli children have been
killed.   How many in Rwanda?  Darfur?  Kosovo?

In Iraq, four of ten civilians killed are children.  How many children will die because of adult actions? Stop killing the future.

How much LOVE has to die for religious or political ideology?  Why
doesn't grief and love unite rather than divide?

We are human beings. We are all the same.  Study war no more.
ENOUGH.   STOP THE WAR.  BE PRO-PEACE

Veronica Piastuch
www.vivagarcia.com

Lead me on my dreams
among different time and space

To share hope
with nations and believers

To observe with modesty
the pure truth

And to reveal prudently
the magic and the mystery

Varda Carmeli, Israel

The Poem is written on the Berlin Wall, East Side Gallery, relating to Peace action, cooperation with German artist Gunther Schaefer. 23.9.2004.
www.vardacarmeliart.com

This is what my friend, the Serbian writer Antonije Zalica wrote in October of 2001, in the program of the International Writing Program in Iowa City, under the title” As Solitary as Zorro’s Horse”:

Aida is a Palestinian, but she really comes from Israel,  has an Israeli passport and any time when she wants to introduce herself she runs into a problem. I myself experience a similar difficulty wherever I go. This is trickiest when people ask where I come from, which is just about all the time.  Most everyone has a ready answer to this, one or two words, no hesitation, no fuss, nearly as automatic as a reflex.  I on the other hand must take a deep breath and then begin to slowly explain what needs to be explained: I am from Amsterdam, from the Netherlands… but not really…I….
In moments such as these Aida always looks a bit unsettled, as if quiet frustration was brewing in her soul, and the clouds of nicotine always swathing her remind me of Sarajevo and Bosnia.  It’s as if we had been classmates smoking a secret cigarette away from the teachers’ eyes, and sometimes I notice I feel like talking to her in my mother tongue.

(Antonije Zalica, “As Solitary as Zorro’s Horse,” Iowa City, October 2001)

The words of my friend Antonije, nicknamed “Nino,” rumble in my head. Only those who have themselves experienced the twofold  solitude know how it feels to have to pause this long before tackling the question “Who are you, where do you come from?”

Nino’s words and similar thoughts trail me on a cold day as I sit in a café at the Tel Aviv University; it operates under the impeccably American name “To Go,” and in its décor mixes French and oriental 19th century elements; it also has a plastic awning over the sidewalk so that you can sit either inside or outside.  It seems as if dual combinations have become an element of Israeli culture: inside-outside; Israeli-Arab; Ashkenazi-Sephardic; new settlers-old settlers; Arab humus—or “Achla” hummus, the refined Israeli version.  I order a moccaccino, itself a beverage with no clear identity, neither straight milk nor straight chocolate, but a blend.  From the loudspeakers some sort of  Israeli-Mexican rock can be heard and I, the only Arab in this mishmash, am enjoying the variety.

I used to come here quite a bit to escape the four walls of  my room and the  cackle in the butcher’s yard under my window; every morning I’d count the chickens having one last scratch before their death trip, and have sonsequently come to pass on the pleasures of poultry dishes.  Now, though, in the toxic Sharon years with its horrors I’ve given up on the hens and taken up another habit, that of staying glued to the TV set late into the night.  I have nightmares, and first thing in the morning need a hit of yesterday’s cold coffee , without even tasting anything, just so as to be able to open my eyes, which then usually fall on the bloody pictures covering the morning paper’s front page.

I am here at the “To Go” café because I have a date with my teacher and friend Simon Levi to work together—an instance of Jewish-Arabic cooperation—on the translation of a play I have written.  Across the street from the café is the dorm of my son, also a student at the Tel Aviv University.

I get absorbed in my moccaccino and think about my son, who just the other day was searched crudely and violently by the Israeli soldiers.  His crime consisted in being an Arab. The soldiers asked him where he lived, and when he said in the city of Um-el-Fachem, right away they emptied his pockets, made him take off his shirt and pushed a handgun into his back. Who is afraid of whom? Everyone of everyone. This is a situation that is hard to explain.  Every morning I wonder whether my son will return home. My son comes home crestfallen. I see his tears.  He tells of the growing hatred of his Jewish fellow students  who try to provoke him. He in turn tries to ignore them, and to find enough strength to stick to the values he has gotten from me.  I tell him that we best cope with provocations and racist humiliation by joining up with demonstrations against the occupation, and by supporting groups which call for coexistence, those Jews and Arabs that are the verso of the coin and who go on now as before determined to work for  peace.

My teacher Simon says: “So much energy just to be able to go on working and loving.” We expand enormous energy to stand on the side of those that believe in coexistence, and to discriminate against the war that aims to push both peoples over the edge into chaos.

I sip my moccaccino and sink into depression. In Ramallah  I have a friend, the poet Ghassan Zaq’tan,  who likes to put hil in his coffee, and who practically swallows his cigarettes—I wonder if he still can do that. Around him screeches the modern version of antiquity’s war goddess  and he breathes sticky fumes (of qualm).  In Jenin live relatives of my family , and, of course, of my people.  Among them is a man who has downloaded his sorrows and his exile in the same way his father did, onto a cake cart which he has pushed through the souk of Jenin for thirty years now, so as to be able to build a house for his family in the camp. When I hear about all the destruction there I think about my uncle, pushing his cart through the hot sun and icy rain through the narrow streets, echoing of his call “Cakes! Cakes!.” And I hear his cart, as old as the exile itself, as it creaks its last creak under the ruins.

The blackest of moods overwhelms me, I look for respite in a cigarette and follow the smoke with my gaze; soon my Jewish friend will be appearing.  I call my son just to ask: “How are you? Is everything OK?” A question I ask him many times every day.  And which I in turn am asked  by the “good Jews”, my teacher Linda Ben Zwi, by Shira Gefen, by…“How are you, Aida? Is everything OK?”

Weighted down by images I drink the )identity-devoid( moccaccino. I see my friend Simon standing next to me during a petition drive against the war and in support of the Palestinian people, I see my uncle, stripped naked and thrown into a Red Cross station, I see my son and I  go to pieces. What if, God forbid, Simon would be killed, or my son, or the relative from Jenin, or  Ghassan in Ramallah. What would I feel then? I’m stuck an emotional trap, constantly torn between all those I love. Who am I? A Palestinian-Arab-Israeli? Just like the American-oriental-Israeli café I hold out for international diversity though love it only when the symbiosis is peaceful and occurs in peace and quiet.  For it is only in times of hate and war that the urge to identity mutates into a trap, and at those times my double solitude too becomes a trap.

There is only one way out of this trap—a trap in which I am sitting right along with all Palestinians and all Jews: to bring the occupation to an end and to grant the Palestinian people right to a state of its own alongside a Jewish state. Only then can I, and my son, and my relatives in Jenin,  and friends in Ramallah and in Tel Aviv go on living, and making art that speaks about our vision of the future.  As well as, perhaps, about a self-satisfied little moccaccino.

From Die Zeit, xx 2002
Traanslated by Natasa Durovicova
Aida Nassralla

I am in the University, sitting in the corridor, and suddenly, I see him. He was also probably invited to the lecture and to the workshop that followed. I watch him from afar. A tall blonde woman walks next to him; her dress looks as though she chose it to express delicacy. A white shirt, beige slacks. It’s the first time I notice her here. I am positive she is a foreigner, from abroad. He is deep in conversation with her.

I don’t budge from my place. I have my “all’s normal” mask on, though under it I feel a warm wave washing to the surface. I look around. The adjacent hall is packed. Suddenly he seems a stranger. He enthusiastically introduces the lady to the students, and I recognize the origin of the heat wave that washed to the surface. He sits in the far side of the hall. I start studying the woman with those underground, penetrating gazes. Her mouth moves strangely. Her face is not beautiful’ you could say, “a nice face”. Her body is OK, normal. All in all, she looks nice. I listen to her delivering her lecture, stealing, from time to time, my gaze over to the man who was totally engrossed by her.

Maybe he is in love with her? I could see it in his eyes. I am filled with jealousy. What does this man mean to me? It’s true, we have been working together in the same institute for quite some time, and it’s true that a slow and pleasant friendship bloomed comfortably between us. Yet each time I see him I am submerged in a hot flood of wetness. For a year now, I keep asking myself what it means, this feeling that drags me so violently and leaves me nowhere, with such a disrupted void in my heart. Is this love? Maybe. I do keep inventing excuses for loving him, and when that gets too demanding, too difficult, I indulge in inventing reasons not to love him. I fail in both cases.

He is definitely not a prince of beauty; not in the classical sense, nor in the renaissance sense. Modern artists will not fall head over heals over him...His blue eyes are imprisoned behind spectacles. He has a large, generous nose, his bald crown is fighting to emerge from unorganized tufts of stray hair, yet his voice can carry you to the top of the mountain and land you there softly. His smile has this canny way of penetrating straight into your heart. Yet, a great voice and a magic smile cannot be reason enough for falling in love.
Last year, I listened to him chatting with one of the girls, and I knew: that’s the man.

“You are a woman who dangerously walk the line, you are no longer a kid. You should be ashamed of yourself. You have a charming lover, with an Adonis-shaped body, a sportsman and brilliant in company, eloquent and witty. What is it with this man? His skin is so different from yours; his tongue is so strange to your ears. His hopes, don’t dwell in the region of your dreams, even his fears are different from yours. What do you want with him? You have a man who drinks from your rivers. What else are you looking for?”
Nothing. I just love him.

I drown in my ruminations. And all of a sudden, the man gets up and leaves in the middle of the lecture, handing a hand-written note to the blonde woman, he walks out. The woman keeps talking as though nothing has happened, she mentions his name every couple of sentences. She says, “AS * said” meaning my man. The heat from my tows, creeps all the way to my hair. Now I am sure they are lovers. Yet, still, I insist on loving him. In my head, the series of the smart sentences get ready to talk some sense into me: Hey, woman, what do you think you are going to get out of all this? What do you think he will take you for? A dumb woman, who insists on courting him?

NO. I don’t court him. I don’t call him. I avoid meeting him as much as I can. But he definitely feels it. HE knows how to deal with me, with women who feel like I do. Yes, he knows what is happening inside me, though he plays as if he felt nothing. HE is perfectly nice and courteous. He is a master of the technique. He must have hundreds of those experiences and knows how to deal with them, how to put on the distance-generating mask.
The blonde woman kept the lecture going for another ninety minutes. I find myself strangely mesmerized by her words, though I float a lot with my mind. Most everyone in the hall is navigating through different phase of slumber, some still tearing their eyes open, some yielding completely, their heads heavy on their breasts.
And then the man was standing there, as if conjured out of the space in front of me.
“You seem very tense. Let me massage you.” He said

“Massage?”
I go home. I have a completely different massage on my mind. Maybe his was just something that fled his lips, without meaning anything? And maybe not. All of a sudden I feel his fingers, fleetingly caressing my back, his touching penetrates my spirit, the heat from his body escalades into everyone of my body cells, that immediately turn into open mouths. The tensions he was supposed to relief have gone elsewhere. My open mouth emits groans I didn’t know dwelt within me. He must have unearthed a treasure trove. He glides down; following his tiny fleeting kisses who delicately and insistently trace my body, all the way to my feet.

All the daily banal syllables that bore and tire me so, flew out and are gone: “Madame, could you tie up my shoes?” “Madame, could you tie up my belt?” “Madame, Saoussan says my painting is ugly” “Madame, I lost my eraser/” “Madame…”

My head is void of all sounds; all the music is in my body. A light tremolo dances through my fingers, and I find out it is OK to bite him, ever so lightly, on his chest. I turn my body to him, and with the tips of my fingers, I touch the gray hairs on the chest I have dreamt about for years. I wrap myself up in the wide surface, and push against his belly. I take his hand and put it on my grapes. His open mouth, floods them with his honey spittle. A soft fire starts licking its flame up my body, until we are both growling and sinking into the sea. My growl wakes me up.

Massage?

Just this one word sent me roaming the far planes of my desire. I am waiting for a word that will turn into a sea. I don’t care that our skins are so different; I don’t care about any of our differences. I penetrate the dark cells of my imagination, knowing that some of it will forever be soiled in darkness, never washed by the light. Yet how can I assuage the flame that consumes me all of sudden?

I look around me; the walls, the cupboard, my papers, my pen and even the computer are engulfed in a sudden chill. I am wordless in front of the mirror, hugging my trembling body, coming ever closer to the glass. My face clings to the mirror. The glass is cold. Just one sentence light the screen in my mind:

“Let me massage you.”

Aida Nassralla

The Ceremony of Women

Every morning women perform their ancient ceremonies
Embracing the flares of their dreams,
And braid their longing for the water wells,
For the song that returns on wings of the wind.

Every morning
The women weave beds from the whips
Of their oppression
To rest their decaying bodies,
They shed the blood of abandoned desires
Sticking to the lashes of their eyes,
And grind their dreams
Like moldy lentil grains.

Every morning
Women adorn themselves with yellowing smiles
Count their cups and garments
And sigh
At the shriveling of their erect breasts.
The women carry on their ancient habits,
Gesture and wink
And pluck the hairs
From the bottom of their hearts.

Yearning for an orifice of hope,
They spit out their aging skins
Into coffee cups
As their eyes search
Through wafts of cigarette smoke

But when a wall of roaring iron
Rises above their heads
And blood spatters on the streets,
When injured eyes whirl
And olive trees cry out
In concealed corners,
Then the women transform their ceremonies,
Tear off their longing for
Ancient feasts,
For the beauty of their chatter.
The women change their ceremonies
And turn into a single scream.

Aida Nasr’allah

EL PRECIO DEL KILO DE MUERTO

La piel late en la herida
El monstruo de la guerra
Sigue devorando
A sus hijos
Goya, Saturno,
Fusilamientos
Bombardeos
Efectos colaterales
En directo
En las noticias mundiales
Asépticos
Inodoros
Indoloros
No duele la carne quemada
Las vidas truncadas
Números en las estadísticas
Ni padres, ni madres
Ni familias perdidas
Cuerpos rotos
Peleles de realitis al límite
Del aburrimiento
De los descreídos de la vida
¿Qué vale más el precio
de las armas que dan de comer
a los obreros que las fabrican?
¿Qué vale más la grasa
de los señores de la guerra
que negocian y se enriquecen
con el tráfico y el comercio
de lo que rompe tantas vidas?
¿Qué vale más los votos
que encumbran a los políticos
que las generan
o negocian con ellas?
¿Qué vale más el kilo
Del muerto palestino,
Del muerto israelí
Del muerto libanés
Del muerto africano
Del muerto pakistaní,
Del muerto europeo?
Sea en aras de cualquier dios,
De cualquier tierra
De cualquier terrorismo barato
De cualquier verdad absoluta
Y dictatorial
El precio de todos es el mismo.
ODIO
Sea cual sea el color,
La condición,
la nacionalidad,
la religión.
El precio de todos los muertos
Es el odio
Que está en los ojos
Violentos que piden
exigen venganza
en las manos que golpean
que aprietan gatillos
soñando ser héroes
de películas baratas.
La vida no tiene tomas falsas
La vida que se va no vuelve.
El PRECIO DEL KILO DE MUERTO
Es moneda de cambio
Internacional
Y cotiza en todas las bolsas
Mundiales
EL ODIO
MONEDA DE CAMBIO
Que no acepta las palabras
Y que es LA MADRE
DE TODAS LAS GUERRAS.
Hay hombres y mujeres
que todavía creemos en las palabras
En el dialogo y la comunicación.
Pero nada puede una palabra
Contra un bala
Aunque la poesía sigue siendo
Un arma cargada de futuro.
Construyamos ese futuro para todos
En paz.

Ángela Ibáñez

I queried, I asked
God where art thou
in this situation in the Middle East
where ever else people art at war?
Mused I on, does he not know
what is going on
up there in Heavens above?
Is it too far removed
from our mundane matters
is God so totally good
he/she sees not "at all"?
seeing only through all the illusions
to all the Beauty of us all?

The answer finally came
in a gentle silent fashion
like a bonding of light
through the air to mine soul
to my Mind
was I given to see
the little Jewish boy
from 2nd WW
now as a picture, now as a metaphore
with his hands up in the air
grey frock, small hat, big crowd
soldiers around
probably on his way to concentration camp
the Little Jewish boy
was fatherless and so they all

feel Fatherless.
Is what I understood,
all people in a war

investing millions of coins
in mechanical means
of "strength" to fight, to find
that longed for home

Outside

yet the Promised Land
is in a Mind who finds
that "Missing Link"
inside a Heart
to come Home again.

Dearest warring fighting Child.
You never LEFT what can`t be lost
Your Inner Paradize
behind your anger, grief and hides.

Go find it there.
Let Peace reside
when bombs of revenge and hurt
have all gone flat
you cannot die anyway
go find your peace where it resides
in Hearts behind our masks
of yesteryears.

Have fun, you forgot to laugh
don`t use mechanical means
to detonate your emotional bombs
scream instead
your message of hurt and finally of
LOVE.

Liv S.M. Evensen, Oslo, Norway

If I Speak...

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part,

but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child; I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Hanna Haska, Poland

Africa

Black
Swollen bellies,
Ribs,
Sunken sullen eyes,
Black despair.
Africa

Black,
Blackland,
Dark womb of man.
Cradle of culture.
Black.
Black African coffins,
Brothers' tombs.

Varda Breger

3 Haiku Poems On Peace

Six billion people.
Hubbling in space.
Visited the moon.
Did not pace towards each other.

Sailing towards Mars,
Diving deep into genomes.
But-
An olive-leaf their bloody hands
Too short
To reach

Born to life
to die old , in peace-
Not
Sacrificed on alters of
God or Land.

Varda Breger, Israel
varda@vbreger.com
www.vbreger.com