Simply Darwish, V: Common Humanity Poem by Birgit Bunzel Linder

You don’t want to be one
Who puts up fences.

“I believe, ” you say,
“In our common humanity.”

I believe in a land without borders,
and in no ordinary death, but

When life’s curfew is up before its time,
all grave sites become occupied,

Just like our countries, where
love has become a collective disorder,

Where we have the freedom to die
from burning homelessness.

Where we become shadows on which
martyrs imprint their resolve.

Where we are all blinded, so that
wounds would be felt as scars.

“Good fences make good neighbors, ”
another poet once wrote.

But not between a land of chronic exile
and another robbed of its immortal claim,

Where grey uniformed soldiers
are ghosts besieging ghosts, where we

Ambush our common humanity,
its future unidentified in the ashes of war,

Where the flesh of the burnt and the unburnt
unite for unmakeable love.

“I believe, ” you say,
“In our common humanity.”

I believe in a land without borders,
and in no ordinary death.

And still you don’t want to be one
Who puts up fences.