We were so satisfied with our stuffing recipes
and so when they bombed tent encampments
blocked entry for prosthetic limbs
for child amputees
blocked machinery for uncovering corpses
from the rubble
blocked doctors who’d earlier been given
“permission” to enter Gaza
we (forgive us)
looked the other way again
as Israel violated the Cease Fire
over and over again with the slaughter of hundreds more,
atrocities committed with impunity
how easily we looked the other way
as Israel asked us for billions more in aid today
from our house of money
we (forgive us) lived happily during the Cease Fire.
Bonnie Naradzay has been leading weekly poetry sessions for homeless people at Street Sense and at Miriam’s Kitchen and also at a retirement community, all in Washington, DC. While at Harvard University in the late 1960s, she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize–-a month’s stay in Northern Italy–-in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. A 2017 graduate of the St John’s College (Annapolis) Graduate Institute, her book of poems Invited to the Feast was published by Slant Books in October 2025; three of the poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
