Stories From The Submerged: Israel

By Shankhoneel Ghosh

It was easy to be misled. You mislead yourself by giving me a bad name.

You look at me and instantly shrink away; for all that you see in me is a drive for dirty production and reproduction.

So, you drive me away, from my home and my hearth, from my bounty and my babe.

I am driven away, so I am driven.

You say that I am uncouth and uncultured, you are afraid that I might corrupt the virtues that you hold dear; for to you, I am too good for your good, my own good.

Even when I am clean and shaven, you like to see through the pleasantry into the filth within.

Your fears multiply, and you become bound to suppress and banish me.

For it is an inexcusable fault of mine to appear to resemble you, to represent you.

And yet, it is on my back that you stand, and it is my name that is your refuge.

You take from me without asking, for I give to you without being asked - you turn to refuse what I could not refuse, such are your designs.

And yet, refuse you must - to turn to me a kind eye, or lend an ear.

Do you not know the collapse you will share should I happen to crumble?

I was told that six millennia and six hundred million miles would be gone before I could return to my land.

I do not wish for redemption in ascending the steps that lead to the throne.

For the throne has always been for you, and so the climb is yours to make.

I want my sky and my field, my river and my dream, and all I know is of my hope that the day is near.

Footnote 1:

It is a poem not solely on politics or race or religion. All modes of inequality and exploitation that began since the dawn of recorded history (about six millenia ago, i.e., since c. 4000 BCE, and hence its mention in the last paragraph’s first line), and all who have been trampled underneath its weight - aborigines, outcastes, women, and even the entirety of nature itself - are the subjects of the poem.

Footnote 2: A note on something called “Poet’s Intuition”

Six hundred million miles (also mentioned in the last paragraph’s first line) - more accurately, 584 million miles or 940 million km - is the approximate distance that the Earth travels on a single annual journey on its orbit around the sun. So, over the last 6000 years, the Earth has traversed a total distance of six thousand multiplied by six hundred million miles. The intuitiveness that strikes an author while writing poetry manifests in such sudden discoveries of humongous measures, without the aid of precise and expensive scientific procedures!

By Shankhoneel Ghosh