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Target practice
Poetry cannot silence this sorrow within me
“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once — there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said
The shelling is from the land, sea, air
Gaza’s children take the brunt,
the clocks stop on so many young lives
the twelve circles of hell await their tormentors
those well-scrubbed, expensively educated girls
with their American accents who trot out the poison
that infects the airways — blame the victim,
Victors’ ‘justice’.
Children’s broken bodies on the wooden floors of smashed up buildings
a sweltering concentration camp, a fucking rat trap,
Children’s hair sticky with sweat and blood
Children die. Die in rooms, parents bereft,
Die under the roof or die underground in cellars and tunnels,
die in the streets of Gaza
whilst above them Israeli pilots
conduct target practice
Like a video game.
The Palestinians have no planes.
nothing to fight back with except the truth.
תתבייש ישראל
Collateral damage is inevitable says the well-scrubbed PR woman of the IDF
- so long as it’s not our collateral damage (sotto voce), because that’s murder.
