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.”

@MosabAbuToha

 

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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