Where do we flee to now from Rafah?
Deir al-Balah? Jabalia?
To mass graves in yards of wasted hospitals?
To gutted streets, rubbled homes, emblems of denial
of the right to return?
To sands of Al-Mawasi, where the searing sun on sea’s relentless
in daylight and nights are desert-cold
hearts of fascists in the Knesset. To a coast
where missiles over water tear into flesh,
a merciless mediaeval pestilence,
and the Strip becomes the mother of all killing fields.
Where to now from Rafah?
Hunger emaciates the limbs of little ones,
eyeballs staring out of starved skulls, truly
this is Golgotha, the place of the skull—
30 thousand and counting
where the black horse and the pale horse
ride abreast, roughshod on the land, their riders
armed with an apocalypse’s lances….
In whose fires are these lances forged?
In whose fires those helicopter gunships, those Bradleys,
and who are they who seek to absolve themselves
of Europe’s sins
by underwriting new holocausts;
the ones who mask themselves with deceptions
of liberal democracy, its feigned morality…?
That same morality that writes rules for others,
not for themselves,
that morality that makes a people invisible,
declaring their lands a land without a people
and their patrimony for the taking,
that same lynch-mob morality
that plants knees of occupation on necks and squeezes
breath from Black and Brown bodies.
That same morality—
Where to do we flee now?
Again to carpet bombings in safe places,
to mournful eyes in lost faces of orphans,
a father cradling the shrouded body of his 2-year-old, his
tears Allah’s benediction of a life snuffed out so soon.
To running sewage, thin dogs that forage
for morsels of bodies blown to bits—
meanwhile they will “not support an operation in Rafah” no
walk back on this they will “not support a major operation in Rafah”.
And if genocide is admitted after all it will be
the day after!