Akashma Online News

By Marivel Guzman/ Akashma News

Palestinian Artisan- Art from Bil’in ♥ Photo by Haitham Khatib

Some people craft dreams
and release them into the wind,
like fragile birds searching
for a sky untouched by war.

Poems are those dreams—
small lanterns of the soul
that refuse to die in darkness,
even when the world forgets to look.

And there she stands,
my lady artisan of baskets,
weaving tomorrow
with wounded hands.

She does not weave from abundance,
nor from certainty,
nor from the comfort
of peaceful nights.

She weaves despite the ruins.

Her fingers bend reeds into beauty
while drones hum above her homeland
like iron vultures circling grief.
Still, she lowers her eyes to her work,
not to the bleak reality
that hunts her surroundings
like an endless winter.

I salute the Palestinian woman.

Woman of olives and dust.
Woman of silent funerals.
Woman who carries history
inside the wrinkles of her hands.

You never stopped dreaming
of a Free Palestine.

Your hands are the testimony of time itself—
aged by sorrow,
yet undefeated by it.

Generations have passed through your palms:

children, bread, soil, tears,
embroidered flags, broken keys,
and the memory of homes
the world pretends not to remember.

Death arrives in waves to your land,
yet you answer with creation.

The Palestinian spirit
does not speak only through resistance;
it speaks through art.

Through woven baskets,
through embroidery stitched in exile,
through songs whispered to children
before sleep.

Palestinian art is vivid with colors:

The red of sacrifice.
The green of olive trees.
The black of mourning.
The white of hope still breathing
beneath the ashes.

All converging as one people,
one memory,
one unfinished prayer.

Thousands of years of tears
cannot stop Palestinian hands
from crafting new dreams.

Because the dream survives
every wall,
every checkpoint,
every bomb,
every silence of the powerful.

And so I say to this beautiful lady:

I give you my poem.
I give you my love.
I give you a smile carried from distant lands.

For as long as women like you
continue weaving hope
from the fragments of despair,
Palestine will never die.

Marivel Guzman © 2012