PART I – BORN TO CHAOS AND IMPRISONMENT

Imagine –
Being born in a decade of hate,
Of fear of being attacked, front and rear,
Of sleeping with one eye open,
A present reality that is far from golden –
It is a nightmare of self-perpetuating terror.
Welcome to Palestine;
The land where the dogs of war
Come to feast and dine.

70 years of violence;
70 years of resilience.
Millions killed or displaced,
Homes vacated but never replaced,
Not even by those who got out alive,
Scrambling to rebuild, desperate to survive.
For how can you not be enraged and stupefied
When your country’s being erased
And hopelessness is causing suicides?
How can you not throw stones and riot
When your own government kills you
And then proceeds to alter the story or deny it?

That is the reality
That Mohanad Younis was born into;
One of many, a broken generation,
Born with a noose around their neck,
Betrayed and forgotten as a nation.
Desperation was an eternal companion,
A sibling, practically,
Always with them like the Colorado River with the Grand Canyon.

Mohanad was a bright, industrious soul;
A voracious bookworm, with the hunger to swallow a library whole.
Dostoevsky, Dickens and Euripides,
Amongst many others;
A young man who wrote his own tales,
Perhaps keen to escape reality,
Or encapsulate it if all else fails.

When guillotines rain down from the sky,
When prayers are said but your god(s) don’t even reply,
No author, nor their best tales,
Can overcome the missile storms and the bullet hails.
This will be the story
Of Mohanad Younis,
The beloved writer who killed himself
Because all else really did fail.