The Embers of Gaza

The world has grown guilty of its silence.

Peoples, mute, watch their governments

murder realities without acting,

slit the human soul

in the folds of indifference.

We are survivors of a declining age,

the years of silence,

oblivion of thought,

arid hearts,

extinguished voices,

the rot of social indifference.

The East is collapsing into rubble,

blinding bombs

fall from the sky,

fireflies in the night.

The earth yawns open,

with the blood of children,

the riven hearts of elders

who will never greet a new generation.

Peoples stare at their governments,

cowardly and mendacious,

killing those people with silence—

ghosts among the ruins,

faces aghast,

powdered with anguish.

We are guilty of not raising revolutions,

of not toppling the altars.

We are guilty of these slow massacres.

What did those peoples do to die like this?

Born beneath the sun of a cursed land,

mocked by ancient writings

of a promised, blessed earth.

Our silence is their death.

Soon, not far off,

the future will sound its sirens;

and soon after,

lungs will turn to embers,

skin will tear,

eyes will go blind—

an atomic glare on the horizon.

Soon, and not much later,

through these tyrants’ fault,

we will suffer the same atrocities

as the peoples who have suffered already.

When we are the ones who tremble,

lifting our eyes to a sky that denies us,

no one will come.

Or they will come…

and we will learn they took their lesson

from our very silence.

Today we are

makers of nothingness,

alchemists of dissolved hope,

apostles of a gospel without resurrection.

Forgers of a dystopian future.

Tomorrow in the hands of beasts,

with atomics in their fists—

children playing with fire.

For them, toys of intimidation;

for us, lives on a pendulum

in the hands of devils.

The condemnation of Gaza:

frightened children,

without childhood,

without adolescence,

existence balanced on the edge of a bomb,

a smile dead before the first tooth.

Playing football on a mined field,

prayer uttered face-down,

forehead pressed into the blood

of a mother, of a father.

The condemnation of Gaza,

the condemnation of Israel—

a new century of crusades.

The condemnation we ignore,

lords and politicians:

a world orphaned of a future,

a world orphaned of children.

Afraid to play,

afraid to sleep.

Someone will witness this suffering.

God—if He dwells elsewhere—

will see this pain.

Someone will read it in history books

and be outraged

far beyond our own faint daring.

Shame will scorch our faces

when, perhaps grown old,

we read of our failures,

our silences.

And when they ask us,

we will fall silent,

ashamed even of the breath we draw.