The Impossible

It would be a thousand times easier for you to lead an elephant through the eye of a needle to catch fried fish on scorched earth to plough the seas to make crocodiles talk it would be a thousand times easier than to extinguish, through persecution a glimmering thought of the way we have chosen As though we were twenty impossibilities in Al-Lid, Ar-Ramla, and Galilee we rest on your chest like a wall we hurt your throat like splinters of glass, like Indian figs and we blind your eyes like an inferno of flames. Here we rest on your chest like a wall. We are washing dishes in the restaurants and fill glasses, for the masters we clean tiles in black kitchens and thus we snatch the bread for the little ones from your blue teeth accustomed to robbery Here, on your chest we persist, We'll stay here, a hard wall on your chest starved, naked defiant chanting poems and filling the angry streets with demonstrations the prisons with pride We turn our children into a generation which carries on our hate, redoubling it as though we were twenty impossibilities, in Al-Lid, Ar-Ramla, and Galilee. Here we shall stay You may drink the sea But we'll tend gladly the olive tree's and fig tree's shade and plant the thoughts like yeast into the dough Coldness of ice in our nerves and glowing fire in our hearts thus, plagued by thirst we squeeze the rocks and our hunger do we still with earth We don't give way We are not miserly with precious blood Here is our past here, presence and the future As though we were twenty impossibilities in Al-Lid, Ar-Ramla, and Galilee take hold! you, living roots and deeply penetrate the ground! For the pursuer it is worth the trouble to take a look at the accounts made up before it is impossible to stop the wheel For every action, a reaction read what the Book says As though we were twenty impossibilities in Al-Lid, Ar-Ramla, and Galilee