by Bonnie Naradzay
On the one hand,
A 19-year-old journalist, Hassan Hamad,
was assassinated by Israel’s army;
they’d warned him on WhatsApp to stop
filming the killing of Gazans by the IDF,
the most moral army in the world.
That they’d come after him.
This is your last warning, they said.
And they did, with a drone strike
on his home in Jabaliya,
a refugee camp in northern Gaza.
You can see on this video
a few journalists collecting
what remained of his body in a shoebox
for burial.The inscrutable grief.
On the other hand, Israel’s army
freely shares videos of their massacres
of unarmed Gazans, on Israeli dating apps,
for clicks, with mocking songs:
“We’re launching Operation 8th Candle
of Hanukkah, the burning of Shuja’iyya
neighborhood. Let our enemies learn
and be deterred. This is what we’ll do
to all our enemies, and not a memory
will be left of them for we will annihilate
them all to dust.” With impunity.
Bonnie Naradzay's manuscript will be published in 2025 by Slant Books. For years she has lef weekly poetry sessions at day shelters for homeless people and at a retirement center, all in Washington DC. Three times nominated for a Pushcart, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, Cumberland River Review, New Verse News, and other places.. In 2010 she won the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize—a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary; there, she had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read Pound’s early poems.
