War Came (to Gaza)

War came / and took the sleep from the bed / took the food from the children’s mouths / took the doctors and the hospitals / and burned them all alive
‘I was trying to run away with my father. In his black backpack, he had some lollipops for me and my favorite toy.
After we got killed, we were left in the street for days.”
Words from Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha
(sadly…no longer “poetry” but life, today, in Occupied Palestine)
War came
and took the sleep from the bed
took the food from the children’s mouths
took the doctors and the hospitals
and burned them all alive.
War came
it carried bibles and bullets in its backpack,
American dollars and British pounds,
the words of politicians and hypocrites and liars.
It came right through the front door without knocking.
War came. Oh, it came like a fist
and those who called it an obscenity
were beaten on the streets
were thrown in the jails
were called “anti-Semites” and “Nazis”
and “Holocaust Deniers”.
War came and while the children died
all the Knesset slept safely in their beds,
arms dealers anointed their greedy
hands with profit,
even the microphones tried to pretend
they were human mouths
and the President (and his puppets) learnt
to pull their own strings…
…but each dark night now
it seems the only safe place left to sleep
is Nowhere-
under-a-non-existent-bed-already-obliterated
-with-your-long-dead-head-in-hands-
blown-clear-away-or-burned-or-buried
by a foreign bomb manufactured
by those
that still
are allowed
teach our children
about “democracy”
about “human rights”
about the crimes of war.
séamas carraher
3-8 january 2023
Note on Image…
Image (“fair use” respectfully) from
Mosab Abu Toha
@MosabAbuToha
https://twitter.com/MosabAbuToha
& Image Updated
Father and Child in Gaza (by Rachel Deutsch)
(“fair use” respectfully)
Mosab Abu Toha @MosabAbuToha
January 4-5
“I asked my wonderful artist friend Rachel Deutsch to do a drawing of the girl lying killed next to her killed father in a street in Gaza. ‘I cannot draw dead people,’ Rachel told me. This is what she could draw. I wish we were all drawings.
This is my previous post about the real picture:
‘I was trying to run away with my father. In his black backpack, he had some lollipops for me and my favorite toy.
After we got killed, we were left in the street for days.’”
…
“Shrapnel was the tattoo
marking your bodies
for the ghetto
of the Dead.”
‘TO GHASSAN KANAFANI’, Mosab Abu Toha
(from Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear)
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