Here’s How We Lie

One of the core pieces from MOLOK

I have to share this piece every so often at the moment. Apologies if you’ve already seen it too many times. It’s one of the first pieces I wrote for MOLOK. I remember vividly, as it was the day after the poet and scholar Refaat Alareer was killed and I was hosting a Gig for Gaza in Totnes that evening, a fundraiser for the Hands Up Project and Medical Aid for Palestine. I’d just been told by one of the nervous organisers that it ‘would be good’ if I could avoid using the word ‘genocide’ in my hosting. I disagreed that it ‘would be good.’ I used the word, of course. This was December 2023. It feels like so long ago now.

The poem speaks for itself, I hope. I was shaking as I read it and spoke the words through tears. MOLOK is half-price at the moment. There’s some good poems in it, I believe.

HERE'S HOW WE LIE
Tom Hirons

There was never a child
And there was never a house:
It must be a trick of the light.
The olive trees grow
And the wild herbs wave;
Sweet in the evening, we lie.

There was never a father
And there was never a door
In the house that never stood there.
There was no praying or singing,
Or coffee to taste;
Sweet in the morning, we lie.

There was never a mother
And there was never a bed
And no one ever gave birth.
No one shed tears 
Or dreamed in their sleep;
Sweet in the night-time, we lie.

History’s a dream
And the dead are not ghosts.
There’s no injustice
Or bloody genocide.
There was never a land
And the bombs did not fall,
No slaughter and this is not hell.

Here’s how we lie:
Grass grows on the graves
And the ghosts gather round
To tell tales. 

Sweet in the evening,
Sweet in the morning,
And sweet in the night
Of our lies.