WHAT IS LEFT?

by Peter F. Crowley

Waiting for rations from an outdoor kitchen in Khan Younis this month. Hunger is now most acute in the southern Gaza Strip.

Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, May 24, 2024Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The NewYork Times, May 24, 2024

     The language you speak has soured, become melancholy, chokes eyelids. Its tendrils lay flaying in dusty streets near occupation crossings in the gated night. Your eyes have grown sallow, as your children's stomachs distended, swollen, as you swat flies from their brow. The streets are your anguish, running, forever running from apartment home to tent back to bombed out abode. Hope was sapped with the last morsel of cat food, finished for yesterday’s only meal, while the powerful stick their blindfolded, deaf eyes deep into the sand, purchasing bulldozers to roll over you.
     You now avoid aid trucks, should they ever appear out of shackled nothingness, to avoid getting gunned down by those fighting terror. 

As a prolific author from the Boston area, Peter F. Crowley writes in various forms, including short fiction, op-eds, poetry and academic essays. His writing can be found in 34^th Parallel, Pif Magazine, Galway Review, Digging the Fat, Adelaide’s Short Story and Poetry Award anthologies (finalist in both) and The Opiate. He is the author of the poetry books Those Who Hold Up the Earth and Empire’s End, and the short fiction collection That Night and Other Stories.

BLIGHTED

by Lynn White

Ireland is to continue funding a United Nations aid agency for Palestinian refugees, notwithstanding claims that 12 of its now suspended employees are accused of taking part in the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel… Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin yesterday praised the “life-saving” work of UNRWA, pointed out that 100 of its staff had been killed in the past four months and vowed that Ireland would continue to fund its work, at a cost of €18m last year. —Irish Independent, January 28, 2024

Once, in Ireland one million died

and we’re still counting.

One million fled 

for their lives

and we’re still counting.

Equivalent to the population

of Gaza

before

starvation ruled the land.

Starvation ruled the land in Ireland

when the potato crop was blighted.

Without potatoes there was no food.

Without potatoes there was no money for food.

Without money for rent colonial landlords evicted,

slave labour of starving men women and children 

followed the rule

through occupation

and colonisation.

And no help came.

No Aid came

to help them.

And still

potatoes were exported.

And still

the landlords did well.

All the colonialists did well.

They always do.

So Ireland knows how it feels

in the depth of its turf,

in the depth of its being,

its rock, its stones, its bones

it knows the story

and that change will come

with survival first

one step at a time

and sometimes words and money 

can effect change

as readily as weapons,

the time the past shows 

the time to make a stand

against political manoeuvring

against a respected decision 

un-welcomed by the most powerful.

History shows the time to make a stand.

For Ireland knows

how lives are blighted.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

THE DEATH OF A POET

by Roxanne Doty

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.

WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF EXODUS?

by Mary K O'Melveny 

Illegal Jewish settlers yesterday attacked Palestinians and prevented them from working on their land in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, in the southern Occupied West Bank. Fouad Al-Amour, coordinator of the Protection and Steadfastness Committees in Masafer Yatta, said in a press statement that a number of settlers attacked farmers from the Abu Qbeita family, preventing them from cultivating their land in El-Saifer area in Masafer Yatta, and destroyed the seeds prepared for cultivation. The settlers were protected by the Israeli occupation army, Al-Amour added. Masafer Yatta is a community of 12 Palestinian villages located in the city of Yatta south of Hebron. Its residents have been suffering from the threat of forced displacement for decades due to the establishment of scores of illegal settlements, outposts and military training zones by Israeli occupation forces. —Middle East Monitor, December 29, 2022

Before I fall asleep each night,

I stare up at my curvaceous ceiling,

darkened by age, pock-marked

by stone, spider webs, jagged roots.

 

Each “room” is bordered by rock slabs,

boulders, dirt mounds. My clay cook

pots sit behind me. To the right, my sleep

ledge is softened by keffiyehs, quilts.

 

I have swept one center section

almost flat. An aid worker found us

a wooden table with two crooked

shelves. My prayer rug is folded there.

 

In that corner to the left, a brass box

still holds my yellowed deed to this land.

Tanks have bulldozed my three homes.

Now my sheep graze overhead.

 

These crooked steps, long smoothed by water,

footfalls, wind downward from their pen.

That slim cord dangling above provides

just enough light to read Fadwa Tuqan.

 

Like me, most of my neighbors have burrowed

beneath West bank hillsides we once owned.

Above ground, apricots, almonds, olives

thrive, as they have since Ottoman times.

 

Jurists who know nothing of our narratives

have ruled that we must evacuate, as if

we were as nomadic as our grazing flocks.

They name us trespassers, transients.

 

The army says our villages are best

suited as live-fire training grounds.

No one wants neighbors who remember

every whisper of their past lives.

I still have the dented bronzed key

to our ancestral dwelling place.

In chilled night air, I am warmed

by memory’s refracted light. 

Author’s note: A recent ruling by Israel's Supreme Court will allow the military to clear a rural West Bank area known as Masafer Yatta for use as a live-fire military training ground. This will mean expulsion of 1,200 residents of thirteen Palestinian villages in the region, in violation of international law. Many say their families have lived in the region for generations and that some families have already been forced to move into caves, leaving their ancestral homes behind. This poem imagines a conversation with one of those villagers now living beneath the ground. 

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

TWO SIDES TO THE STORY

by Lynn White

Cartoon by Matt Lubchansky at The Nib, May 12, 2021

There are always two sides to every story,

you said.

The protesters were armed.

The protesters were violent

when faced with soldiers in full combat gear.

Faced with snipers armed with live ammunition.

Armed but

only with stones,

and only some of them.

There are always two sides to every story,

you said.

I ask,

to every story?

Do you really believe that

for a demonstration of unarmed people

when the snipers and soldiers

are already waiting

ready.

There were terrorists amongst them 

intent on doing us harm,

You say

so, yes, to every story, every story.

Really?

Would the not harm be similar 

to the tens who were killed

and the hundreds that were injured?

We have a right to defend ourselves,

you said, 

so yes,

there are always two sides to every story.

Every story.

Well,

so, you will want to hear it for the Nazis then!

No? 

That’s not what you meant.

That story stands alone

one sided.

Really?

Perhaps the number of sides

depends on the differences in power.

Perhaps it’s not alone.

Really.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal and So It Goes.

ISRAELIS DESTROY PALESTINIAN VILLAGE

A Found Poem from Reuters

by David Radavich

A Palestinian boy at the site of his family’s destroyed tented home in Khirbet Humsah in the Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, November 5, 2020. CREDIT: REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta

Tuesday

a Bedouin village

demolished

displacing 73 Palestinians,

including 41 children.

Tented homes, animal shelters,

latrines, and solar panels

destroyed,

mattresses, computers,

carpets strewn

across the desert

without electricity,

sewage, or running water.

Election Day in the U.S.

869 Palestinians left homeless

so far this year.

Winter is coming.

David Radavich's latest narrative collection is America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019), companion volume to his earlier America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007). Recent lyric collections are Middle-East Mezze (2011) and The Countries We Live In (2014). His plays have been performed across the U.S. and in Europe.

CAN QUIET STILL CREATE SOUND?

by Mary K O'Melveny

Palestinian protesters take cover from tear gas, Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Israel-Gaza border, June 8, 2018. CREDIT: JACK GUEZ/AFP via Haaretz.

Hamas has a new array of tactics—violent protest, burning kites and the occasional rocket—to preserve the fire of resistance. While it's uncertain the situation will escalate into military conflict, Hamas alone doesn't decide —Haaretz, June 9, 2018.


Quiet will be met with quiet
said the Israeli officer
and violence with a response
that is appropriate.  Of course
one’s ideas of appropriate
vary widely depending where
one stands.  Rock throwers raise their arms
and lose a leg to rifle fire

based on orders given in private
to fearful soldiers, not philosophers,
who find themselves ensconced
on exploding hills.  Which side is worse,
they have no time to debate.
In moments of silence, they may stare
out at youngsters running toward harm’s
way, lobbing missiles even higher,

wonder what zeal makes them try it,
despite the odds, when a pause occurs
in mortar rounds.  Their nonchalance
is almost thrilling, their voices hoarse
with fury.  Decisions to expropriate
ancestral lands haunt them as they stare
across barbed wire, imaging farms
on hillsides that fuel their ire.

Is anyone willing to defy it,
to announce, when a pause occurs,
that forgiveness is what he wants,
that harm’s antidote might be remorse?
Instead of blood for blood opiate,
perhaps such visions might be shared,
words of peace to close down alarms
before sounds of silence expire.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals.  Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age will be published by Finishing Line Press in September, 2018.

BETWEEN THE LINES

by Dennis DuBois

A demonstrator uses a racket to return tear gas canisters fired by Israeli troops during a protest where Palestinians demand the right to return to their homeland, at the Israel-Gaza border in the southern Gaza Strip, May 4, 2018. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Not to worry, my friend, nothing
will be asked of you,
but for a moment with your ears open,
to read between the lines.
it is only an intellectual exercise, something
one does to feel good
about oneself, and if you can have it
without risking the moral station
you occupy or an iota
of your accumulated wealth,
all the better. Rest easy
and breathe. Listen:
acre by acre they steal our homeland,
parsed into Bantustans, residence by residence,
they evict or bulldoze our homes.
They destroy our infrastructure, our mosques,
our schools, sanitation facilities.
Denied medical care, we die at the turnstiles,
Our organs transplanted into their people.
The men hide as they are marked.
The women march, children throw stones.
Snipers react with bullets. Tear gas canisters
aimed and fired intentionally
mangle protestors’ faces, eyes go black.
State of the art weapons and bombs
are dropped on us. The air reeks
of what has been lost, of unrecovered bodies,
buried in bombed out buildings.
Our celebrated youth disallowed
travel to collect awards.
Fisherman are attacked
to cut off food supplies.
They reroute and confiscate
aide-bearing ships.
Near and far they track and assassinate
our leaders.They denigrate us,
call us rats, and kill us with impunity
They pull up the roots, set alight
three hundred year old olive trees.
They arrest, jail, and torture our children.
They poison our drinking water, bomb our hospitals.
They remind us of the German pogroms
Even as they do the same to us—
They want it all, all of it,
and they don’t care where we go, but not here,
not in our historical homeland.
What have I to lose? Have I not
already lost everything?
If your heart breaks, or if a feeling of helplessness
overtakes you, it is a start,
a place to cleave toward one another.
The world sometimes offers a lukewarm shoulder,
but solidarity without shared pain,
an intellectual exercise.

Dennis Dubois holds a Master’s Degree in social work and has worked to help others for decades, while writing poems along the way. He has published poems in Bee Museum, Curved House, The Projectionist’s Playground, Runcible Spoon, and MessageinaBottle. He is preparing a collection of poems and a first work of fiction. He is an American expatriate living in Copenhagen.

IDENTIFICATION AND CONSERVATION STATUS OF THE AMERICAN MILITANT

by Cally Conan-Davies

A new militant from Arkansas guards the entrance to the occupied refuge on Jan. 14. Photo: Amanda Peacher/OPB

Free-ranging, undeterred by fences.
Known to engage in earthworks
and entrenchment.
In response to media attention
its call changes pitch.
Immune to openhandedness,
it goes armed to the teeth.

Although it can mimic the walk and talk
of creatures that can’t be disturbed,
this odd bird is often seen
out in the cold, ear to the ground.
It thrives beyond the pale.

Evidence that it parasitises
refuges of other species
until it becomes difficult to determine
which is which
suggests that it considers itself
in need of protection,
although such exposure
it will
aggresssively guard against,
tooth and nail.


Cally Conan-Davies is an Oregon resident and frequent visitor to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

REQUIEM FOR A DOOMED YOUTH

by James Penha

A one-and-a-half year-old Palestinian infant was burned to death and three of his family members were seriously wounded late Thursday night after a house was set on fire in the village of Douma, near Nablus. According to reports, settlers were those who set the house on fire after targeting it with firebombs and graffiti. The Israeli military called the attack "Jewish terror," while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials echoed the claim, vehemently condemning the attack. —Haaretz, July 31, 2015

Rest

Ali Saad Daobasa (2014-2015)

In Peace

Ali had no GPS round his neck;
only the noose of the occupied.
Ali had no Oxford foundation,
only the ardent love of his family.

Ali had no arrow plunged into his heart,
no time even to scramble before he was killed;
only the shrill, demented firebombs of terror,
shouts of revenge and an invisible Messiah.

As the death of a lion is the pall
of all who allow the endangered
to die in powders prescribed for profits,
the ashes of a Palestinian baby settle
on this earth too silently before those who take
in the name of parties, apartheid,
and passing prophets.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News.

UNAMERICAN CON

by Charles Frederickson

All four of my grandparents

Were born in Sweden great-grandfather

Member of Svenska parliament Midnight

Sun legislators making heritage proud

Declared intention to recognize Palestinian

Statehood long overdue illegal settlements

Extending far beyond green line

Contrary to genuine peaceful desire

Netanyahu slams Sweden’s unilateral steps

Contrarian going against universalistic values

Ambrose Bierce defined un-American as

Wicked intolerable Heathen Garrison Keillor

Opined I think the most

Un-American thing you can say

Is You can’t say that

Burt Lancaster dared to ask

Can anything be more un-American

Than the House un-American Committee

Fred Swedish for peaceful harmony

Shalom Salaam pax on you

Islam isn’t the major problem

Combating hateful violence is

Shared principles justice compassion tolerance

Require respectful dignity without exception

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson  proudly presents YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 . 

WE ARE ALL GAZA

by Laurie Winestock

Image source: Global Voices Online

We are all Gaza

That is why we do not see you, Gaza
That is why you are the blind spot that does not diminish
Why we all allow you to cry like a bird, stripped of feathers
While we are without hearing - deaf to distraction
While you try to breach the sea and reach another world

That is why when we see you torn in half
We are quick to eat large meals of flesh, while you search for water

We are all Gaza
That is why we know nothing
Nothing about Gaza, and want to know nothing
About Gaza

Why our minds glaze at the thought of the nights and days
Of Gaza,

We are all Gaza

Gaza, hunted down, trapped for an eternity
Generation after generation
With enemies to the north and south
Enemies who will not accept Gaza but will not reject Gaza
Because they need to feed on Gaza's pain
And because they use the fear in Gaza to measure their own fear
And remind themselves that they can control it

We are all Gaza

That is why we say to ourselves, Gaza, what is it?

Because we know we are all Gaza
That we are all here under
A merciless sun that we try to outwit
Surrounded by a lost childhood with terror in our hearts
That we must deny every day

Because we think we are not vulnerable
and we know we will always be
Because we dreamt we had a childhood but we know for certain
that the childhood of the children of Gaza vanished
Into air and smoke

We are all Gaza
Not knowing who we really are
Because we have watched you Gaza, suffocated
Decade after decade
And knowing this we know we cannot be, or hear, or smell
Our own flesh too long
Better not to know

That we are all Gaza
And that watching Gaza be forgotten
We have forgotten who we are


Laurie Winestock is a poet and writer who has lived extensively in both Israel and the U.S.  She is an activist and has witnessed the Israeli Palestinian conflict from close range for many decades. Her work has been published in Jewish Currents Magazine, as well as heard on San Francisco Poetry Open Mic Podcast. She can be heard reading at numerous open mics in the San Francisco Bay Area where she is now living, writing and studying Arabic.

OCCUPIED LANGUAGE

by Chandramohan S

Graphic created at Simply The Best Fonts

The adjectives were abandoned
Suffixes and prefixes scrambled
Vowels lynched and hung upside down
Epithets beheaded
Remnants from shattered strings
Conjoined for a synthetic memory

The unoccupied portions on the
Map of alphabets resemble
A Hieroglyphic of colonial logic symbols,
The refugees flee through edited check-points
And seek asylum in an alien tongue
Bleaching through barbed wire fences of apartheid
Abbreviating their surnames and
Dislocating their punctuations
Silencing their phonetics in sound bytes
Stripping bare the sterile meat of
An evacuated language


Chandramohan S is an English poet based in India. His poems reflect the socio-political struggles of the marginalized, the working class and the nomadic outcasts of the world who are victimized and then forgotten as nations clash and wage relentless war. His work has been profiled and/or published in New Asia Writing, Mascara Literary Review, About Place Journal, Counter-Punch Poetry, Thump Print Magazine, The Sentinel, American Diversity Report, Poetry 24, Green Left Weekly.

WASHINGTON AND THE REDSKINS

by James Penha

The Map Is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths—Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish

Fleeing European horrors,
God's chosen landed at a great rock
on which they built their havens,
their temples, and their theocracies
and squatted the nomadic tribes
ignorant of salvation and so damned
(if human enough to have life
after life at all). Settlers made
manifest their destiny
to exploit, expropriate,
disease, enslave,
blanket, and reserve the savages.
And when the natives resisted
eternal occupation, the settlers,
republicans by then and democrats,
made war and baubles
of redskins.

And now Washington mouths
itself agape in the mirror of the middle east.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

INDISCRIMINATE CONTINUOUS TERROR: THE OCCUPIER’S IRONY

by Charles Frederickson

After cease-fire talks failed, Israel said it intended to put an end to “indiscriminate continuous terror.” Heavy artillery fire was reported. (Photo: Mourning after at least three Palestinian children were killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on Thursday. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times) - NY Times, July 17, 2014

Daily humiliation collective abusive punishment
Systematic intimidation traumatic racist mistreatment
Ethnic cleansing again under siege
Blindfolded justice unbalanced tipsy scales

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu described
Decades-long oppressive occupation as apartheid
Racially segregated roads partitioned checkpoints
Strip searches targeting most vulnerable

5 decades of military entrenchment
7 decades of forced dispossession
Lost opportunities fragile abandoned truces
Dashed expectations refusals negating agreements

Palestinians denied their humanity since
1948 lacking foresight insight oversight
Expelled private property villages demolished
Uncivil wrongs intimidating bullyrag tactics

Morally bankrupted by sanctified victim-hood
Fair-minded solution demands planetary involvement
Endorsing economic boycott least of
All evils only alternative left

Government-run smear campaigns digging up
Vicious propaganda attacking brave truth-tellers
Labeled terrorists fiction prejudicing facts
Ruthlessly silencing gentle dissident voices

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson  proudly presents YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

KERRY ON, JOHN

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Prince Valiant epic comic adventure
Positive mindset wading into troubled
Waters flotsam debris garbage patch
Pelagic plastics chemical sludge pollution

Pitch Black Sea bullyrag revenge
Hearts of Darkness octopodal depths
Derelict abandoned shipwreck cast overboard
No hope of being reclaimed

Slivered driftwood floating turd extremists
Inbred superiority complex insular chutzpah 
Thug mentality spreading putrid humanure
Compromise declared a dirty word
                                                                       
History isn’t made by cynics
But by brave-hearted visionary dreamers
Unafraid to end Zionist occupation
Wheeler-dealers spinning Vegas odds roulette

Peaceful coexistence only viable alternative
Stubbornly ignoring Uncle Sam cries
For help illegal settlements universally
Condemned drowning in leaky pool

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

EXODUS-TO-DUST

Poem by Charles Frederickson

Graphic by Saknarin Chinayote

For Palestinians, Israeli elections signal deepening occupation --Haaretz, January 21, 2013

Emptiness echo full of itself
Reverberating eardrum downbeat tambour percussion
Vainglorious ambitions disconnected unanswered prayers
Orchestrated symphony forever left unfinished

Terra not so firma quaking
Earth reopened bottomless sinkhole aftershocks
Natural depression hollow subway passages
Ants streaming through clogged arteries

Shorn sheep led to slaughter
Tough tasteless mutton gyros grilled
Axis rotating in wrong direction
Anti-clockwise alarm no turning back

Unholy land-grab borderless uncivil war
Black white gray distinctions obliterated
Singed hawk feathers decalcified plumes
Phoenix smoldering in spitfire embers

Fearless hate-mongers playing for keeps
Recycled unsettled grievances sold out
Unruly mob committing unjustifiable offences
Numbed conscience bleeding cardinal sins

Mauve dusk undermining tomorrow’s dawn
After dark luminous eclipsed aura
Overshadowed neon deep purple afterglow
Nocturnal rhapsody evocative fallen stars

 No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

INVASION OF GAZA 2012

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Image source: Occupy Wall Street

Inside the heart of the invader
There is a cave where the corpses are stored
A cave of ice that keeps the bodies
From decomposing and putrefying
So the invader needn’t suffer the stink
Deep cold freezes the last expressions of terror
On children’s faces
Freezes the arms of dead parents
Around their slaughtered infants

The frozen bodies are neatly stacked
In the lightless cavern inside the invader’s heart
To make the most efficient use of space
So there will always be room for more
Because the bodies keep coming and coming
And they must be put away somewhere
The grandfather mowed down
In his olive grove
The teen picked off trying to get home to family
The pregnant mother crushed
By her collapsing roof
The toddler burnt to a crisp
By white phosphorous

Inside the heart of the occupier
Are bleak frigid factories that turn the murdered
Into building materials
For constructing homes on stolen land
With lovely gardens and swimming pools
Inside the heart of the occupier
Are bitterly cold prisons
Of torture and indefinite detention
For those who resist
The relentless encroachments
Of the mad blind machine

Inside the heart of the nation
In a cave of black ice
The explosive voice of self-righteous hypocrisy
Booms and echoes off the walls
We are defending ourselves
We are the upright and the good
We are the chosen and
All we do is the will of God

But there are other voices as well
Inside the heart of the nation
And inside the heart of the world
The small voices of grasses in green pastures
The healing voices of warm rain and still waters
The steadfast valiant voices of those
Who refuse to cooperate with bulldozer politicians
With marauding colonists
With tormentors of the rightful inhabitants
Voices nearly impossible to hear
In the roar of war and propaganda
But necessary to hear and to heed
If true justice is to roll down like waters
And true righteousness like a mighty stream


Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective). He lives in northern California.