Last year I thought I didn’t really write any poetry, but
looking back I see I did in fact compose a few poems and it seems a good idea
to have them all in one place to look at - even if I am the only person who
ever does so. So here goes with my year of poems, except I don’t remember when
I wrote some of them so it won’t be the diary, but still a record of what took
my attention enough to want to scribble a few words:
GAZA 2014
The anger
rolls on generation after generation,
Will it ever
stop, we ask?
Where did
they learn to
Immure a
whole people in a ghetto,
A tiny square
of land where
They’d be
sitting targets?
The numbers
of dead children numb my brain.
It is the
images of mile upon mile of piled rubble
And nowhere
to run,
And nothing
to live on,
While on the
other side sirens
Call the
people to run
Through
leafy, well-tended suburbs
To shelter,
safe, and well-built,
While futile
shells spatter a few holes
And rattle
some dishes.
These rockets
won’t return
You
great-grandfather’s olive grove
That he
planted for you, my brother.
They are
stones in boys’ hands
Against a
rank of might tanks.
Though they
make you feel a man
Who can
stand, at least stand.
We sit in our
comfortable houses
Half a world
away
And beg you
to stop.
But it never
will. You never will.
The horror of
those few years of history
When helpless
millions were packed like cattle
And taken to slaughter,
Is still
etched in nightmare,
As if those
tattooed numbers have now become DNA.
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