The Braille of disaster

700 years of stupidity will pass, I tell you
700 years will go by and our burned down city,
with her huge broken cement bones and her twisted opened wounded legs,
will wake up again.

700 years of death and not even one guest -

Wake up, my city. wake up.
Hundred and thousand of years
and not one guest
but wake up, my city! Look up!
Shadows moving on the ground, people are coming.

A million years we were sleeping here and we should wake up now -
because guests have arrived
and they didn't come for the Hummus this time
and they didn’t come for the gay clubs or the sea shore this time.
They are here for us.
Today, they came for us.
They are the Archeologists that followed our tracks,
the Coroners that came to dig within our traces,
our Gravediggers.

And they will enter the city and open the locked gates,
they will move their fingers on the smashed concrete and conclude everything that had happened to us,
they will rummage with their soft long hands in the torn up rectums of our apartment-buildings,
they will dive in the sea and find the blind rotting boats that sank on their way out.

Some day they'll come a long
the men I love
and they will move their fingers softly on the destroyed walls of the room where we used to live.
Day and night the Braille of disaster within every broken wall.
Day and night the Braille of yearning - written in the cracks.

Stones speak louder than testimonies.
Archeologists can say more than poets ever did.
Archeologists and Coroners and Gravediggers and fortune tellers -
they will move their fingers across our memories
As if stroking the back of a cat.
Back and forth
Back and forth
And under their fingers -
all the city's dead ducks of memory will scream, in shivers
And under their fingers -
All the city’s sirens will lose their sound and breathe heavily
And under their fingers -
our shoulders - that are only bones now -
will squeak and curse -
but they will touch our war without gloves
They will touch our war
And they will touch the walls
And they will dive to the rivers
To the rivers
Yes the rivers of babylon
where we sank down
and how we wept
when we remembered -

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we were exiled from our language / We are here to talk

Sivan Ben Yishai
A Theater writer, director and teacher, born in Tel Aviv, currently living and creating in Berlin. Her last piece “I know I’m ugly but I glitter in the dark” premiered in Radialsysten V Berlin [ID Festival], these days she is finishing the work on her new text for stage: “Your very own double crisis club”.