swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

a life of walls
Sharon Lopez Mooney

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A life of walls

He was a curious child to them,
fearing their passionate dreamer
small boy poet, their son,
hours alone, stubby pencil to scrap of paper
hiding his hunger in words,
his heart so delicate,
there was no safe place
in this strange Jordanland of escape,
so he hid his poems in sand walls.

When he came of age, he returned
to the heart of his country’s history,
burying his soul in a deep grave
alongside that of his Palestinian peoples’,
he laid down on that embrace of land,
exposed war secrets out loud in daily print news,
promised his life to regain their freedom,
allowing its fire to consume his years
in the agony of prison walls
built for lies and torture.

One remembers promises like that,
and so he searched for his soul
in the dark of pain and bars,
held in place by bloody bricks of loss.
But news comrades saw his trial by conflagration,
and fought for his freedom, but only begot
sequestered living behind invisible walls
surrounding his home, converting it
to a political territory, blocking his friends,
his voice, trying to destroy their dream.

Finally, in the crux of expulsion from his motherland,
sponsors brought him to a distant new home,
he and his children, to an unfamiliar life
of abundance, with barriers he did not
make, and no passage back to his desert love,
and the now soiled ground, strewn with the victor’s
dirty truths he’d forgotten, poems they had burned,
paintings they had shredded.

Exhausted, he drew in breath
and readied himself to build again
in a new city, open and free, to unfurl
from his crumbling dreams, promises
for his children who could only see home.
The price this time was too great,
they’d again built suffocating walls,
but this time for his soul.

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“A life of walls” is one of the poems in Sharon Lopez Mooney’s collection, Human Collateral, dedicated to the many people touched by war and especially Salam Khalili, a Palestinian journalist, painter, master storyteller and poet  in Jerusalem before, during, and after the 1967 Six Day War in the Mid East. While an editor of a daily newspaper, Salam published an uncensored story about the intentional starting of the Six-Day War (which was proven true 20 years later). As a result, Salam was convicted and given 25 years imprisonment. He brutally tortured in Israel prison for seven years. After a group of journalists worked pressured Amnesty International, the organization was able to get him moved to house arrest for 3 more years, and finally release.  Salam was deported from Israel forever.   Salam died in 2015, he and his grown children never having been allowed to return to his beloved Jerusalem. He asked Sharon to pass on his stories in her own original voice of poetry.

Sharon Lopez Mooney, poet, is a retired Interfaith Chaplain from the End of Life field, living in Mexico, part-time in USA. Mooney received a CAC Grant in ’78 for rural poetry; co-published a local anthology; co-owned an alternative literature service. In ’22, she was a “Best of the Net” nominee, and chosen for “Editor’s Choice” and “Elite Writer Status”. Currently, she facilitates a poetry workshop.  Mooney’s poems are published nationally & internationally in: “Glassworks, The Blotter, Umbrella Factory, MuddyRiver Review, Revue{R}Évolution, Avalon Literary, ZiN Daily, Ginosko, California Quarterly, Galway Review, Existere, CALYX, The UNIverse Journal, Cold Lake, Smoke & Myrrors (UK), Brown Bag, New Verse” and many others.