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| Top: Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda. Bottom: Screenshot of Bisan’s Instagram post referenced in the poem. |
A voice from the dark
speaks quietly to the living light,
a soft, devastated voice
without tears or trembling
because the woman of this voice
has seen too much
traveling through this beast’s belly
for more than a year
and now knows what
humankind can do
to children
to hospitals full of elderly, ill
and injured people,
to entire towns,
knows the outcome of bombs
the smell of death and garbage.
“The world is complicit in this.
No one must be silent in this,” she states.
She expects nothing now,
after her year of messages
cast upon the online sea,
her Emmy, her fame,
but wishes the world would march
to the borders of Gaza,
call out, shout, pray
make a presence that would
stop the madness,
“What next?” Bisan asks, “what next?”
Karen Warinsky is a former finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Contest and a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee. She is widely published in anthologies, journals and E-zines. Her books are Gold in Autumn (2020), Sunrise Ruby, (2022) (both from Human Error Publishing), and Dining with War (2023, Alien Buddha Press). Warinsky coordinates poetry readings under the name Poets at Large in CT and MA.