I Will Raise You Pillars

by Sarah Ali

Oh mighty and tender siblings

You who hold each other beneath the rubble

Who will erect pillars in your name?

When they pile you underground

Wrapped tightly in bright blue body bags

Then destroy every record of your peoplehood?

You whose graves remain unmarked

Whose tombstones, too, they will reduce to dust

No soft and downy earth to cushion your resting place

No fresh grass to sprout from your body

Just blood to dampen the sand

When will the moss be granted liberty

To grow across your epitaph

Or the ivy to turn yellow, then amber, then

Brown?

I dream of the day your gravestone grows so

Weathered your name becomes illegible

When the only force wiping away your

Existence is time

And sun

And wind

And rain

I will raise you pillars. I raise them every day.

I will plant you greenery and flowers. Water

Them with every breath

I will honour your martyrs and I will embrace,

Embrace, embrace the living. Like my own. My

Own.

I wrote this at the top of Glasgow Necropolis (from the Greek ‘nekros’, dead person, and ‘polis’, city), a beautiful Victorian cemetery in Glasgow where over 50,000 people are buried. It’s one of the few cemeteries that keep a record of the professions, sex, and causes of death of those buried in it. As I walked among the intricately sculpted, centuries-preserved gravestones, the images I haven’t stopped seeing since October of martyred Palestinians, buried under rubble or dumped unceremoniously in mass graves, wouldn’t leave my mind. This poem is an effort to honour those Palestinians, and my commitment not to let their memory fade.