It has been difficult finding ways to cope with all that is going on in the world these days. After a long walk with my dog I sat down and tried to write. This poem, a work in progress, is all I could come up with. It is difficult to write about these things. About death and war and massacres, genocides, occupation. Difficult still when I have no experience with them. Do I even have any right to write about them?
Furthermore, will your words even matter? Will anything change? Can you actually make a difference, affect change, not stand idly by dumbstruck by your own powerlessness? I don’t know. I don’t know if I should have written this (but perhaps I needed to). I don’t know if it is any good. I don’t know if its quiet anger or its exhausted, almost disaffected tone is a positive contribution. I don’t know if I should have shared it. I don’t know.
I Saw a Missile Lying in a Bed (LORA Lying in a Bed) – 2021
I saw a missile lying in a bed my phone showed it to me a photographer showed it my phone (I'm sorry, I'm too exhausted for eloquence) they took this sleeping killing machine and sent it throughout the world that's the true range of a short-range ballistic missile I think it's a short-range it looks like a LORA, but with no rear stabilizing fins like a big bullet without its casing unclothed and sleeping where once a family might have dreamed where once a child might have cuddled up to their parents finding shelter from a nightmare but there is no shelter in Gaza though the bed is bent under the weight of this potential death it looks so light, the floor so strong but how many floors have broken? how many storeys crushed? how many people's stories ended? how many feet have run down how many stairs that aren't there anymore? how many stairs are suffocating people, rubble dust filling their lungs they become the dust that buries them this isn't the dust of the Bible the dust that men return to when Job said, "Remember now, that You have made me as clay; and would You turn me to dust again?" but "[they have] cast me into the mire and I have become like dust and ashes" was he really talking about the dust of crushed homes?