Here – is a city shaped by the weight
of its own name: Gaza – guttural, grave,
where thunder is man-made,
and the lullabies are gravelled with shrapnel.
Children walk barefoot across the fine line
between yesterday and never again,
holding jars of memory –
watered grief in cupped hands –
their faces shadowed with questions
that language has abandoned for want of answers.
Mothers rock emptiness in their arms,
learning the shapes of absences,
fattened on stories that end mid-sentence.
The dust here grows thick as silence;
even silence has a body, and it lies where
compassion once dared to linger.
The world turns away,
draws curtains of trembling apathy –
tenderness retreats,
flattened beneath the boot of indifference.
Empathy chokes on slogans;
morality, now a skeleton
picked clean by the talons of convenience.
Here, there are numbers
that never add up to justice,
statistics that eclipse the names, the lullabies,
the stones painted bright by small, battered hands.
If humanity dies, it dies here –
not with a soldier’s bullet,
but with a thousand eyes averted;
each child that falls is a bell,
ringing in the hollow of our collective chest –
asking, always:
When did we unlearn mercy?
When did we lose the art of seeing
the other as our own?
The softest thing in Gaza
is still hope –
and even that, starved and spectral,
clings to ruin
like morning trying to rise
through a glass darkly,
searching, always,
for humanity’s pulse
in the silence left behind.
by Bakchos
