In the last issue of the newsletter, I highlighted books recommended for an introduction to public health ethics and to the ideals of human rights. Here I wish to highlight a poem and its poet, and another perspective on human values.

Taha Muhammad Ali is a 76-year-old Palestinian poet who has experienced human rights abuses throughout his life, having been bombed and driven from his homeland during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 when he was 17 years old. He returned a year later to live in Nazareth, one mile away from the ruins of his former village, and he has lived there ever since.

He writes in Arabic where the word for poet is sha'ir, "one who knows through feeling." Much of his poetry has the quality of storytelling by a village elder, a source of homespun truths. As an auto-didact poet, he defines humanity through his search for man’s dignity in the pathos of the human condition, and offers us hope and wisdom when he finds it. His poems are windows on everyday experience through which universal themes are indelibly revealed, with much sadness, but with optimism.

He is well known to Palestinians, but his international career is only now being nurtured by Jewish, Arabic, and American poets and editors. In his poetry, we can appreciate the soul of what inspires public health – goodwill and humanism that transcends politics.

REVENGE[1]

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

*

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

*

Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

*

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

                Nazareth
                April 15, 2006

His poem, “Twigs,”[2] begins 

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,

And ends

After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
and all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first things
to putrefy
within us.