Jesus Christ Looks Like Me
A messianic offspring was brought forth
But before him was life anon
Lady Mary, bless our homecoming with thy ghost-white robe
And thy womb wrestled with the doubts of a village
But the Bethlehem Star guided thee for the pilgrimage of a week
Until thy burdened raiment gave thee the sacred palm tree
And its holy dates enveloped thy cervix till it became gentler
The delivery of thy son, whose world spread from a city
To today’s makers of ashes
He felt the famine and exile, undraped by his divinity
He fled the massacres and charming betrayals
Isho, how have we re-witnessed it all?
Lady Mary, incite thy vivid memory
Into my ageless body
Thou hast seen the land that fails to escape me
And under the clouds of penurious Nazareth
Thou hast claimed thy name
Thou hast captured the living waters from thy well
Like tar close to thy chest
And the archangel greeted thee a heaven’s accolade
Even if it meant losing thine only son for the red earth’s sins
Even if he were to rise from the holy land to its sacred sky
Un-resurrected, from estrangement’s heavy weight
Isho, dost thou attend to my life and call it thy own?
The mooncalf painted thee with the scenes of his daylight
As if our Lady of the Slain had not met with Gabriel under a parting lune
Our Theotokos darkened for she spent her days working under the light
And they speak of light, but their portrayed paleness suggests the loss of the sun
But thou art most comely, and needest no change to adorn thy beauty
How dare they call thee?
Isho, dost thou look at me looking like thee?
They have cut his stomach, opened his guts dry in a moment of curiosity. Stole his teething rag and placed it in a museum of a far away land. Pulled his viscera and played with it, cut it open for the rich’s tongues. Every nailed part had been sacred flesh, but the artists used the debarred shade- the palest, the ashiest, and painted his skin. And his black, thick hair, now branded as the son of the sun. Then, they claimed art is not political.
The most acknowledged Palestinian martyr is the most renowned figure in all of history. His martyrdom, or his simple act of existence, has boundedly devised our perception of time and altered our calendars. His mother, our Lady, is considered the mother of all humanity, and is the most known, most sung of woman in history.
As the savior of the cardinal sin has led us to a rebirth of paradise, he held his prophecy and they imitated his annunciation. He settled with his worries on the Cenacle’s table and bit his suspicion in the form of unleavened bread, and they situated his communion as a treacherous sacrificial ritual.
My land of miracles, where births can be woman-born, a nativity even the glorious Eden had no prime in achieving. The land where the woman is the carrier of salvation, redemption, steadfastness- the antipode of a man’s sin. The land where the woman is not solely rescued, but also entrusted with sanctitude.
If Eden were the cradle of sin, Palestine be the cradle of Godliness.
If the Morningstar be the rival of sin, the Holy Land supersedes paradise.
When Lucifer gravitated and anchored himself to a spot on the earth, it must have not been Palestine, for this ground has birthed the sainthood of most prophets. Even with colonizers, it remains untainted. And perhaps, that is why western wealth, belonging to alleged devotees of Jesus, are keen on woman-slaughter- to cease a second immaculate conception.
Jesus is a cause, that is his rifle. They shriek at the speeches of a Canaanite with thaumaturgic blood, they wish to quell his convictions by the wood that his adoptive father reigned whilst using.
And he, like me, lived as a refugee to elude King Herod’s infanticide, whilst I fled a colonization’s massacres. He, like me, entered a strange land. Forced, longing, wistful. His land, which is also mine, had been colonized during his continuance by Roman provinces. An odic refugee.
Jesus, with your birth thronging the inn, the horses held sight of your first blood, and the partly-eaten hay surrounded your head like a crown, turned it blonde for the first and final attempt and then brushed itself down to allow your majestic, dark, voluminous hair to travel across the plies all over your temple and face.
You have become the muse of every artist, entrapping you according to their brush’s narratives, and in pursuant to their resonance. Tracing your outline with the dull shades of the night, rinsing the olive skin off your face and your stonemason’s working hands.
You have risen not only towards the layers of sky, but also as an artefact to capitalism’s dreams and emperors’ religiopolitical schemes. Commissioned to the wealthy’s unartistic sights. Capitalized on, as your faux birth of date has been coined to eclipse a Pagan holiday.
But this prophet was of ragged-wrapped birth, not of silk or byssus. He was of Bethlehemite birth, not the more ancient Jerusalemite. His second touch, after his mother’s arms, had been a manger the angels placed him on. How do our enemies claim to be eaten with infatuation when they have been changing your race, fabricating your birthday, dropping missiles on your homeland, and executing your family?
I have been roaming around this land my ancestors settled on, roaming till the ground patches my thunder-struck lips and overcasts my judgment. My eye socket has strained, as if I had been constructed by a coercing priest to embroider his cathedral’s libertine ceiling, and in return, banish the life essence awaiting my steps back home.
It moves around to part hands with the distant land I have grown accustomed to, but familiarity wouldn’t be the ring of Jupiter. I have not been born in the ancient Jerusalem, or Bethlehem, or Nazareth. I grow trees in my garden to emulate my forbidden land, and I have become a preacher to politics’ ascendancy. I roam to flee walking and succumbing to the material structures hitting me.
Whether you were crucified or not- that is not the thesis. Death is not the affliction, the staircase to its tower is. How far has the human tool gone when it comes to iconography- and how did they manifest multiple crucifixions onto the same man and place when they have written countless monodies.
There was no choir as he was walking, only the sound of a mallet marring the wood. The time struck to find itself attiring today’s inhabitants. They grabbed the wood, polished its bestrewed surface, and painted with the doomed ceruse. Wood is too dark, to them, it cannot differentiate between its own color and the blood dripping from the vilified man. It must be seen- the blood must be.
Christ’s wreath of thorns has now reduplicated into a razor wires’ checkpoint Palestinians have to pass through miraculously, defeating death ever so often.
I wonder if he lived, being a refugee, like me when he was exiled to Egypt. If his senses regressed back to his first day in the cave, to his first touch, to his first motherly kiss now halted by his apostle’s treason. If his gaze occupied feelings of rootlessness. His own belongings now stolen and possessed by his ancient enemies. What makes Our Mary’s shawl, or Our Jesus’ crown travel continents and settle under a Westbound glass coffin?
The demiurge incarnate has gifted his body on the tablecloth, and the disciples disassembled him like his blood is aromatized wine. Why would a fallen angel need to land on this heavenly kingdom when we have testified to a serpent that doesn’t just tempt, but also defiles. A greater murderer that has never once held a greater cause.
You may have wept when the traitor led you to persecution, and to that I have been followed by many Judases. Judases that are not unequipped, that are not struck by poverty the way he was. Your Roman foes and colonizers are my imperialists’ brothers. Did they bathe in clag instead of water?
And I shalt destroy Rome. For you, I would.
The world can so cavalierly be ruled, I do not find any strength needed as an eligibility. You just need to be a Machiavellian, a symptom of fear. I caroled with the angels in the womb, I’ve confessed before, but then I rose out of the amnion and murdered one.
There is a sinister equation here, one declining to be approached. The Judas kiss was a pretense, an antithesis to Mary’s loving nature with her son. Had Jesus been white-looking, or a lad with painted eyes, then Judas wouldn’t have had to mark him so that the Romans can recognize him.
Even when traditions are said to paint the celestial intimately to one’s own culture, race is a swaying boat on this shore of supposed sovereign clouds.
They have been pirating him, piece by piece as they’ve dismembered him, and placing their features onto his, their clothes onto his body, their language onto his tongue, their landmarks under his feet. It should have been contrariwise.
Mary held Jesus very dearly the way he was, the way she was. As do I. I am of their blood, of their families, of their lineage. I am of their creed, of their kindness, and of their agony. I am of their purity, and of their resistance. They are the features engraved on my skull; the skin I have been blessed to wear from my noble birth.
And I feel no reparations for the kiss, for instead I have been subjected to scars by the ones who claim they own a eucharistic heart. With their pronounced prejudice and racial metamorphosis, with their portraits of you as a shrine whilst their prayers kneel to your crucifiers.
رَأَيْتُ لَوْحَةَ الطِّفْلِ فِي مَغَارَةٍ عَمِيقَةٍ
وَكَانَ لِيَزْحَفْ كَالأَفْعَوَانِ إِذْ لَمْ تَخْضَعْ أَفْرُعَ شَجَرَتِهِ لِثُقْبِ سُوسَةٍ
فَأَتَى مَلاكَهُ الأَعْمَى وَعَبَرَ جَارِيًا
لاجِئًا إِلَى خُيُوطِ أَرْضٍ نَاصِرِيَّةٍ
يُحَاوِلُونَ تَقْلِيدِ أَجْنِحَتِهَا الهَالِيَّة
وَلَكِنَّ قِلَادَتَهُمْ فَانِيَةٌ
شَقِيقَةُ طِينٍ طَفِيفٍ
لَا يُقَالُ عَنْهَا فَنًّا إِنْسَانِيًّا
وَلَا رُوحًا إِلٰهِیَّةً
وَبَكِيَتْ أَضْلُعُ مَرْيَمْ لِرُؤْيَةِ طِفْلٍ بَرِيءٍ
قَدْ خَاضَ حُرُوبَ الدَّهْرِ لِتَتَقَلَّصَ آفاقُهُ
.إِلَى مَسْرَحِ سِتَارَاتٍ غَرْبِيَّةٍ
تَلاشَتْ أَقْمَارِي إِلَى جِدَارَاتِ تَرْبِيعٍ أَخِيرٍ
لَمْ يُعْلَنُ فِيهَا سِنُّ العَوْدَةِ
وَتَشَبَّثَتْ ذَاكِرَتِي لِلبِّ تِلْكَ المَغَارَةِ
مُحَرَّمٌ عَلَيْهَا رُؤْيَةُ الصُّقُورِ
لَمْ تُحَلِّقْ فِيهَا إِحْتِضَارِ الأرضِ المَوْرُوثَةِ
إِنَّمَا شَهِدَتْ تَراتِيلُ الشَّهِيدِ
المُضَحِّيَ لِعَقِيدَةٍ آسِرَةٍ
.هِيَ مَذْهَبُ الفِلَسْطِينِيُّ الفِدَائِيُّ عِيسَى
أَرَاكَ فِي مِرْآتِي
خَالٍ مِنْ ضَبَابِ أَسْلِحَةٍ أَفْشَتْ بِسِرِّكَ السَّامِي
فَهَلْ تَرَانِي؟
ܡܝܬ ܠܗ ܕܩܕܝܫܐ ܟܕ ܐܒܕ ܠܫܢܝܟ
ܘܫܚܩܝܢ ܐܢܬܘܢ ܡܢ ܫܢܐ ܕܥܒܕܟܘܢ
ܛܘܒܝܗ ܨܠܘܬܐ ܕܒܫܢܟ
ܘܐܚܕܘ ܐܒܗܬܝ ܤܓܝ
ܘܫܡܝܐ ܢܕܥܘܢ ܠܫܢܝܟ ܕܗܙܝܢ
ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕܡܡܠܠ ܐܢܐ ܡܠܬܟܘܢ
ܘܐܚܘܛ ܠܒܥܠܕܒܒܝܟܘܢ
ܘܒܢܐ ܦܘܪܩܢܐ ܕܕܡܟ
ܘܠܝܬ ܐܒܗܬܢ ܫܘܒܚܐ ܝܬܝܪ ܡܢ ܕܝܠܢ ܫܘܬܦܐ
ܘܒܫܪܒܬܐ ܕܙܒܢܐ ܝܬܝܪܐܝܬ ܐܬܕܟܝܬ ܒܢܒܝܘܬܐ
ܘܤܡ ܟܠ ܡܕܡ ܕܐܝܬ ܠܐܪܥܐ ܕܐܪܥܢ
.ܟܕ ܡܤܒܪܝܢ ܩܝܡܬܐ ܕܡܢ ܩܝܡܬܐ ܕܢܦܪܘܢ
