Genocide

’ but he said ‘no apologies will be accepted after the genocide what has been done has been done I want you to look in the mirror and ask where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide…’

even the word sticks in the throat

chokes my strangled mouth

speechless

stabs its own heart with

a sullen funeral of solid

cold stone

 

it has lit a fire

that seethes slowly

in the murderous

minds

of these monsters

dressed

in their sharp-skinned

suits

 

with masks that mirror

their sickly scourge

of speech

sweetened with

savagery and

contempt.

 

This is a world we have paid

for with blood and sweat and

the dreams of our children

washed on their wicked way

flushed far out to sea.

 

See these small men with power

and their laughing soldiers

sucking the life from our bones

the parched breath from our hopes

stealing these words we bless our

sleeplessness with

 

preaching from their juntas

as if all we wanted to eat

and drink

was the poison of

their rotting

promises.

 

genocide…

good people will die in this silence

 

as for the rest

this some-of-us of the stone-deaf

with hearts of cold-steel

and eyes blinkered-blind:

your pessimism and persecution

are now claws for dull thought

 

your pretence of prayer

as useless here

as a hanged man

pleading

from the gallows

 

and all we can hear

are the strangled

screams of those

we are safe to ignore

 

or woken suddenly

to sit

silent at your own

incineration

as if weighed down

with the pestilence

of prosperity

instead of grief.

 

genocide

here is a song, margarete, a

song, shulamite,

for those who are deaf

 

for all we can hear

the wind

through the trees

now whispers

surreptitiously

because the people

stopped listening

to its pleas

one hundred

holocausts

ago.

 

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani”?

Jew or Nazi? Palestinian or

Zionist?

 

Listen, little brother,

in the midst of this murder

there is a wind that is speaking to you.

Even if you cannot listen

 

it can no

longer now

whisper

no more.

 

séamas carraher

11-19, September 2024

 

… “We are tormented by the silence of the world” Reverend Munther Isaac at the landmark Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, 25/12/23  (Video – Democracy Now 26/12/23)

 

“… Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric…”

(Adorno, originally published in Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft

in 1951)

 

“dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Sulamith”

(Video – Paul Celan reads Todesfuge)

 

Image

Palestina  (2024)

Maitane Azurmendi, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Reference

Interview – Al Jazeera -10 September 2024

Refik Hodzic on The Bosnian Genocide and Gaza War (Drawing Parallels | Centre Stage / Al Jazeera

 

Notes

“Palestinian Pastor Munther Isaac addressed his congregation and the world and he said and I quote ‘Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an Annihilation. This is a genocide. We will rise. We will stand up again from the midst of Destruction as we have always done as Palestinians though this is by far maybe the biggest blow we have received…’ but he said ‘no apologies will be accepted after the genocide what has been done has been done I want you to look in the mirror and ask where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide…’”

Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh

 Irish lawyer’s stunning speech at The Hague accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza

(Video: Israel accused of Genocide)

 

Also:

“Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament,”  Sermon delivered Saturday by Reverend Munther Isaac at the landmark Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem

Democracy Now

 

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

“The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self satisfied contemplation.”

Theodor  Adorno

(Adorno, originally published in Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. in 1951)

 

 

 

 

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