Tents have given way to bricks and mortar,
but refugees they remain.
The years of waiting and neglect
have given way to a grim determination
to hold on against all the odds.
For memories persist
of that ancient and beloved land.
Songs and stories have kept alive
the hope of return through long exile.
In the camps of the dispossessed
life rises from the ashes,
time after time,
revealing the will of a people to resist.
These wronged, who will never give up
their just rights for morsels of land.
After fifty years of anguish and mourning
for the land they lost,
for Palestinians there is still
only one place to go,
home to Palestine.

[Al Nakba is Arabic for the Catastrophe. Palestinians use this to describe the 1948 loss of their homeland.]

Steven Katsineris

From Green Left Weekly, June 30, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

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