Between the first and second picture,
Five meters!
And between Death and Life,
Just five meters!
Opposite the morgue in Al-Aqsa Hospital,
Our balcony overlooks,
where the echo of the dead
can be heard from the throats of the living
as they cry and mourn for them,
I wake up every duty
exhausted from lack of sleep;
To the sound of crying and wailing,
Then, I talk to myself about
the laziness of the morning
combined with the desolation of the days
and say: “Who died has survived, and who’s survived has died.”
Then I return to the same five meters.
To discover the opposite meaning of Death,
which may be Life!
A young man is shaving his hair
close to the tunes of death
without hearing them,
not because he is deaf,
but because he is accustomed to the scene,
His ear becomes familiar
with the wailing of bereaved mothers,
He no longer holds his breath
when he inhale
the smell of blood
that haunts the place
due to the gluttony of bleeding!
He neither see nor hear,
He doesn’t feel,
He is just a ghost,
He sits five meters away from Death,
Thinking that he is alive …!
Dr. Ali Tawil
