It's About ... Time!

From Back in the Day up Until Now! ( Speaking of Time, I Wrote This Almost a Month Ago ... ! )

I give you my recording of me reading this writing — mistakes and all!

When in 1999, Peretz drove us to dinner at their son’s house,

and we passed newly-built Bedouin houses,

and Tehila said the government is giving them free water and electricity

and I said they should because they also forced them to live there

and they’re nomadic and it’s not natural for them

well after that, when we got home,

she asked me if she should give them a candy

and proceeded to enlighten me with loudly-volumed (To me it was yelling! Maybe screaming …. ) four hours of lecturing, informing, explaining, telling, recounting

what it was like to wake up every morning to more dead in the big tent they all shared –

a whole community, never knowing who’d be alive the next day, being killed by Bedouins as they were,

I heard it as a thing of the past, a story, not something that would be lived again ….

When in 2014, there were alarms that went off to give warning of a bomb about to drop

15 seconds from the siren sound, I thought that was a very short time – almost nothing!

What can you do in fifteen seconds? Just lie down and hope and pray ….

Now, nine years later in 2023, I think fifteen seconds is a lifetime! Literally! It’s time and any time is time! This time, the people had not only no time, they had less than any time, they had less than no time at all, they were waking up dead already, they were being burned and hacked up in their sleep in bed, they didn’t have a second, they didn’t have a chance, some didn’t see the light of day, didn’t open their eyes before they were gone ….

**

The poem-song referenced without specific, direct mention that I wrote back in 2014: