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| These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza. —Literary Hub, December 21, 2023 |
Before they were bombed from the sky
warheads raining on their crucified city
littered with the bones of winter
and blood of children
they were a poet and a teacher
a mother and father who understood
the hope of words, the way they slipped
through walls and checkpoints
couldn’t be stopped by soldiers
or guns, how they empowered
defied the laws of physics
and occupation and oppression
To the secretaries of war who murdered the poet
words were sterile instruments, tools
like wrenches and screwdrivers, hammers
from the hardware store, like bunker buster bombs
and hellfire missiles from a rich country
with democracy and security on its lips
and complicity on its hands, to these priests
of destruction, the poet was a calculation
the result of collateral damage equations
estimates of death rankings of acceptable levels
of slaughter
The poet was killed in their home
and in a school and a hospital and a UN shelter
and a refugee camp and on a war-torn street
and waving a white flag
before they died the poet had asked
When shall this pass?
The poet understood that words are fragile
even with their power could crumble and die
they need an audience to listen
to absorb to act and the poet knew
that all the children of Gaza
are poets too
Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel Out Stealing Water was published by Regal House Press, August 30. 2022. Her first poetry collection will be published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024. Her short story “Turbulence” (Ocotillo Review) was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart prize for short fiction. Other stories and poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, The New Verse News, Saranac Review,Gateway Review and Reunion-The Dallas Review.