Take me home when I’m dead
By Iqbal Tamimi
Take me home
When I’m dead
I am crowded by corpses
Occupying me
A long queue of departed loved ones
Are still marching in
One after the other
Changing me from within
While one of my eyes
Is teasing the other
Hiding its despair
Behind my sleep
Take me home to my homeland
Where the houses that lost their doors
Are crouching at the borders,
Waiting to hug their orphaned keys
Take me home when I’m dead
To where the hills are waiting
To clothe me in the bush of thyme,
Or resurrect me an olive tree
Take me home when I’m dead
To where the stones of my demolished home
Became the toys of an angry child
Stripped of his right to fly a kite
Take me home when I’m dead
To where I will join the battalions of the freed oppressed
Abandoning their prisons at last
Death will set them free
A thousand years of exile
Will never issue a new birth certificate
For the occupiers’ lies
I might wear a hat
My tongue may forget its name
But my feet will still identify
With the soil
That found its refuge in me
Take me home when I’m dead
To where the houses will embrace their long lost windows
To where the skin of the soil will breathe
When I am reborn an apple tree
I dream of sleeping in the womb of my mother land
Take me home
I am cold
I need to wear my dignity
