the Israeli woman posts a photograph of a child
A Palestinian child. Children have faces.
Underneath she writes in Hebrew —
…………………………..(name) was alive. (Name) is dead now.
…………………………..Two years old. A month old. Six years old.
Noelle Canin
Double Truths
We don’t need to make peace with friends.
It is crucial to make peace with enemies.
This war in Gaza has brought nothing but injury, death, grief, destruction and the deliberate perpetuation of the eternal Israeli victimhood syndrome.
…..We talk endlessly about Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization – which it is – one equally concerned with preserving eternal victimhood among Palestinians.
…..We don’t talk about settlers who carry out acts of terror against Palestinian farmers in the south Hebron Hills in the Jordan Valley, as well as in many other areas in the West Bank, farmers who are not terrorists, who do not constitute a threat to the State of Israel.
…..We don’t talk about the indiscriminate destruction perpetrated by the IDF in major cities in the West Bank under the guise of “security.”
What Hamas did on 7/10 erases all words.
What the Israeli government is doing to us and, through the IDF and the settlers, to Palestinians, is beyond words.
Drowning in War
Hold fast to the garden,
the little blue shine of a bird.
Its long, curved beak probes for nectar
in the flowering bush next to my kitchen.
Make this bird as necessary as knowing
what the government does in my name.
Triplicate (Poems On Domination & Consequences)
Fate
If the Fates come to take
those I love, bear witness to this —
………………………..they will not be victims
………………………..of what the ignorant, or,
………………………..perhaps, the grieving,
………………………..call terror.
……………….
Rockets fly into neighbors’ homes —
………………………..tonight? Tomorrow?
……………………….My own home?
If the Fates come for those I love,
I will not wrap them in white sheets,
lay them at the door of the man
who forced this war. He will not see us.
And if the Fates come for me, well,
there is no wrong in dying. But
bear witness, bear witness to this —
……………………………………I am not killed
……………………………………by a foreign hand.
……………….
Israel. Gaza. May 2021.