It Was Never Yours

Of course you will.

Destroy our homes, our sacred places of worship,
Our cemeteries, our crops, the land that gave life and bread to us
for centuries.

Steal our knowledge, denounce our rights, burn down our
trees and appropriate our goods.
Belittle our pain, ignore our tears, separate us from loved
ones, and objectify our bodies.

Take our blood for granted, and shatter our dreams.
Accuse us of fabrication, falsify our origins, subjugate our country,
And rob us of our peace with your hollowed soul.

You can indeed ruin it all,
For only those who hold no rights to the land
and its tendrils of memory,
Who have not tasted petrichor at the first kiss of rain,
Who have not buried their dead, or prayed to their God,
Who have not tilled the soil and sweat its labor,
Who have not crushed the grapes to birth the oldest nectar,
the vineyards’ wine that lingers in the throat of history.

For only those who have not learned to carve beauty from tufa stone,
To lay brick upon brick and raise sanctuaries
That echo the liturgy of our past and living breath
Or to lay loved ones beneath tombstone crosses.

Of course you can destroy it all.
For you have never owned or lived the land as we have.

Had you borne any history on this soil you desecrated,
Had you truly lived upon it—nurtured by the soil and watered by your own labor—
you would treasured it, not ruin it.

Had you known the toil of this land, you would guard it as your lifeblood,
not uproot the very vineyards and trees that fed you.

Had you belonged to this land, you would cherish it, not raze to the ground
that which you bled for.

Had you been connected to this land and laid to rest its dead,
you would not despoil the tombstones.

Had you truly built what was sacred on this soil,
you would not tear it down and lay it waste.

But you did.
Because it was never yours to know, to feel, to live, to love.