At the Five-Month Mark,

A poem about remotely witnessing the horrors of the Gaza genocide through my screen, unable to affect the reality.

the buildings all dance like orchards in storm-winds,

their broad boughs of windows giving way to the gale.

Bitter harvests of concrete are picked up by hand,

pale stone-fruit of bone packed tidily in bushels. As

famine looms in the North, Gazans eat grass and drink

 

polluted water to survive. Animal feed replaces flour

and grass soup becomes delicacy. Bombs are the totality

of music. The dead are abandoned to feralized cats.

The dust-bejeweled pray in Arabic, plead in English.

They live-tweet the tanks and mortar shells, old friends.

 

The hospitals surrender their machinery to gravity,

while refugee tents are stripped down for menstrual pads.

Every reporter is picked off by snipers. The UN is attacked

without repercussion. Throngs of the starving are murdered

for rare flour. Fishermen are fired on for rejecting starvation.

 

It is a necessary cleansing, yes, but not ethnic in nature,

for these are not human beings. Snipers corral hundreds

in half-destroyed hospitals. Tactical whales chase krill

from Safe Zone to Safe Zone. Pregnant women fall dead

in their tracks. The passive voice is abused discriminately.

 

Multiple billions in tax-dollars enable this. The President

of America signs checks carte blanche. Armaments ship-

ments sent out every thirty-six hours. Hundreds of food-

trucks stopped dead at the borders by civilian Settlers

with inflatable bounce-castles. The President of America

 

fights Drought with Fire. The American President is blood-

thirsty, senile. He refuses to change course. The ear-

plugging Loyalists think they’re supporting a moral volcano.

Thirty-four-thousand prayers become smoke. Fourteen-

thousand songs forever unfinished. The living are reduced

 

to living like cavemen. All universities bombed, all archives

destroyed. South Africa takes the First World to court.

The Fourth Estate only publishes Israel’s defense. The US

vetoes a third Ceasefire vote. The UK abstains. The UN seems

useless. The World’s Most Moral Army steals women’s lingerie,

 

films themselves humiliating their carapaced captives.

Nothing more than stark-ribbed chattel, they have the

Star of the Master Race burnt onto their skin. Tough guys,

Settlers, and successful so far, supported by every country

that matters---the ruling class, with their delusions of grandeur.

 

From their colonial biers the vampires maintain hegemony.

They alternate air-dropping dumb bombs with food-aid,

a sumptuous innovation in psychological warfare. Two now

have burnt themselves alive out of protest. Through our

screens we keep screaming. The muezzins are all silent.

 

In a mendacious PR move, America will build a new port for

Gaza instead of just freeing the idling trucks. The concrete

will take thirty days to congeal, but Israel is already selling

the offshore oil rights. These wars, when you look at them,

are all about resources, and who is going to control them.

Author's Note

Published by About Place Journal, official publication of the Black Earth Institute, Oct. 2024
https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/shaping-destiny/before/sean-eaton/