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To the Prisons Heroes

 
 
 

You draw flowers, waterfalls, gazelles racing the wind, and houses made of heaven in the dark of the nights… You raise your children from two by two meters cells by emitting traces of you and I am bathed with your spirit of life… I burned with the cold winter water… and I hurried to the fireplace.

 
 
 

I was absent for a week from my children and when I returned I held them… I wondered in the darkness of the prisons through your letters, only to be eased by the light of life and freedom which is inside you.
I go away and you lure me back to you… The little particulars of life take me away from you, only to find details of you on every corner… I leave you and the thought of you touching the fingers of your children through the window makes me suffer… jolted by the electricity of your will to connect through small gaps... The glow in your eyes as you touch the maturing of your children’s features with passing of days.

By the window, I see your eyes filling with tears as you bid farewell to your children… At night, you dream of gifts, the Eid, Friday morning talks, coming home at sunset to dinner and a kiss of the dreamers of freedom and justice… those dressed in the veil of night, awaiting the dawn which is embellished with flowers of colors, grasping the stone of freedom, advancing on the first adventure of riding the sea, the distributors of amaranth on the hills of the night...

The night... the cold… the frozen showers on your bodies … the confession of your prison guards… your children’s fingers… your father’s unshed tears…your mother’s shed tears...a guava on the window… a handkerchief, a nail clipper, a picture… a lover’s tear… a marriage through barbed wires …a gate opening… an exchange of prisoners… a bird in the room… a food strike… an unfinished love story… an unhealed wound… a piece of paper… a capsule… khandarish … better prison conditions… a camera in the cell… medical treatment in humane conditions… an early night bird returning to your cell… a gate that will open one day… dawn, release and freedom; yet to be...

Tayseer Barakat

 
 
   

To the Prisons Heroes