A spring day

I try to archive some of my thoughts, some of my feelings. In a diary. I'd always felt it's easy, but, I've gathered it's difficult, too. When you diary the life of someone. Even when you diary a fragment of someone's life. For the life of someone is not just one day. it's not just an event. It's not just a circumstance. However, for a sole day I tell. Or rather, for a single moment. Or more accurately, for a small time frame filled with the uncertainty of being. A baby with a bleeding face. No thighs. No feet. Amputated. Disabled. A spirit among animals. In animal compassion. In a city in flames. A child of a nation under the bayonets of guns, cannon balls and tongue flames. In a moment, decades of injustice and terror. Horror and death on a spring’s day.

Spring is supposed to be the season of flowers, but this spring the children have forgotten the flowers. As they have forgotten the toys. As they have forgotten the days without shooting weapons. But, without forgetting the bloodied face of their friend. The face of their friend that they will not be able to see anymore. The friend that will come in a dream. With a bloodied face. And they will not be able to sleep any longer comfortably. Their sleep will never be the same again.

I make my hand a punch. Both hands. Two punches. I raise my punches high, but I have no-one to hit. The TV picture makes me dizzy. The TV screen transmits unmonitored pain. Living souls. Half dead souls. Dead souls. And I can do no more, but hope the pain stops.

The powerful verses of a poet come to my mind: -"In white hopes is growing the new day coming/wakening us up from our long sleep/that mighty day is coming”

Hope makes our wise people survive. Light will fall on the faces of the fallen, and a white day will be for the survivors. And no one will dare to forget the city in flames. The soul of the child among animals. That baby with bloodied face. These verses cannot just be an entry in the diary. History will be written again. Will be reset to the meaning of pain and with the intention that the future does not reproduce ever again, such human bestiality.

Counsel and trial change from pain. Pain itself becomes source of change. Change does not come free ... why freedom is so expensive. And one can’t find it randomly, because freedom is life!

Perparim 1997