by Moudi Sbeity
as if a warning is a good excuse.
This means over ten airstrikes per minute.
What else could we do with a minute?
I won't name anything lovely for you.
I won’t save you from this terribleness, saying
we could plant more than a hundred seeds.
That perhaps we could feed a hundred people,
sustain a worldwide hymn till heaven hears this
aching chorus. Some poems need to show you
how much it hurts. Some poems need to leave
you wondering
just how tightly a heart must be closed in order
to champion a thirst for destruction. Just how
desperately the soul must be choked before
waging its inner horrors. Just how much more
can we rip each other before remembering that
a minute is sixty seconds, and a second is about
one breath cycle, and one breath cycle is all you
need to stay alive. I won't even do the math for
you, the one that calculates all the breath cycles
that encompass a minute across the millions of
people now breathing in the unsanctioned dust.
Just how much ignorance, and how heavy of a dose,
and how often, does it take to poison one person’s
blood before he decides to launch more than a
hundred missiles, before his guilty fingers
violently reach into God’s pulse.
Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, educator, and psychotherapist. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by The New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression.