Shostakovich Leningrad Symphony
comes to mind this night, this cold September air
receding into the terrible morning,

As Israel armor and bulldozers
Drive through our lives with impunity,

Death, the talisman of their fury,
They and others kill Palestinians (and downtrodden Lebanese living there)
as if harvesting leaves falling

And burning on an autumn night.
How many sheaves of horror, how many dead
reported at Sabra and Shatila?

We count your heroic dead
as we count the aimless years
of our hypocritical lives.

We the spectators (the Silent Majority)
who did nothing here in America or abroad.
How many dead, how many dead,

Their fingers broken,
The young men’s faces slashed
because they refused
to sell-out their lives to the Phalangist thugs,
and their Israeli puppet-masters pulling the strings

In this macabre play of horror,
In the Lebanese night.
Haddad, the butcher, and his Israeli henchmen,
Boastful brutes

Their insidious laughter
coming from their snarled mouths
on a bitter Friday night,

Others in the world slept in self-satisfied beds.

The Shostakovich symphony of disaster echoes
like the rumble of dark thunder,

How many dead, I ask myself.
Hundreds, thousands? Those rivers of blood
spilled across the earthen floor of the camps.

On television screens
We still see the horror
In a tragic mural painted in more blood—
Those butchered, shot,
and thrown into piles of garbage (in a mass burying ground in the Sport Stadium by Israeli bulldozers).

The women raped
And hung, their screams like the screeching of violins

In this Soviet symphony I hear on a night
in loveless September.
The cinder block houses stormed
by dark monsters with machine-guns—

Israeli Uzis, not unlike the Nazi troops
who searched for defenseless, quarry at Leningrad…
Now at Shatila and Sabra,
Old men and women lay
In a shattered sleep—
bullets in their heads
against the walls.

The camps of Shatila and Sabra,
those Goya nightmares— our nightmares
on a September night,

There you are—
families gunned down.
See the smiles
on the Phalangists and Israeli faces?

They never cared about life,
For they feared death.
Cowards against a defenseless people,

The only passion they knew
on a heartless September night.
Sharon, the bloated,
stubby-fingered general,
planned the massacre with glee
in the privacy
of his wobbling, arrogant head.

Cover your dead with our grief,
Those of you who survived the bloodshed,
Remember the Palestinian dead
on this Crystal Night massacre.

The wailing and screaming tears the bitter skies.
Bullet-proof vests, Phalangists in shorts
They scurry like rats from cinder-house
to cinder-house.

At Akka Hospital,
Maimed and wounded, carried away,
Nurses raped and beaten
by Christian militia, professing innocence
in their sordid wet dreams
at Shatila and Sabra.

The refugee streets stink with death
Our lives stink with death.
Hypocrisy, our makeshift plumbing,
in our nightmares.

I hear the horns, the violins, the flutes singing
In the September night wind.

What song do they sing?
We have lived for centuries
of the old denial, the blood-walls of hate.

Identification papers handed-out
At a sport stadium; Zionist troops interrogate
the dead whose skins are pale like manikins,
and then we ask why—

Why so many dead in the streets
at Shatila and Sabra?
Rubble, death, medical wives,

Sisters kissing reporters’ arms
Because they want to know
“Who killed my brother?
Where is my father?
When will it all end!”

Shostakovitch symphony comes to its heroic end
on this September morning,
The slumber, my sleep, in our history,
Half-dream, half nightmare,
As the first autumn leaves begin to fall…

The revenge of cymbals, of the militant drums,
I hear in this morning dawn…
The tiers of the stadium wet with blood,
Palestinian blood,

Our hands are caked with their blood,
and the blood of others

We left behind in the gutted street
of retribution.

Note 1: I was in Lebanon at that period and we knew about this monster massacre 3 days later, after Israel allowed journalists and reporters to visit the camp.

Israeli bulldozers unloaded tons of chalk on the dumped bodies, one layers after the next ones.

Israeli troops lighted the sky for 2 nights so that the murderer mercenaries could achieve their macaber task thoroughly.

Note 2: I posted on my blog several articles on that events from various eyewitnesses and reporters.

Note 3: The camp had no fighters or weapons. All the fighters were shipped out of Beirut to Tunisia a few ago back with US guarantees that the helpless Palestinians in camps will be safe and secure. Even the Lebanese army stationed close by failed to intervene.

Luis Lázaro Tijerina, Burlington, Vermont