No Less Than Life

Every life is of equal value – a truth
without borders, without exceptions,
not a slogan, but the quiet heartbeat
everywhere.
A Palestinian child holding a rusted key,
an Israeli mother whispering lullabies,
how do their dreams differ?
Where do their sorrows part ways?

To count some deaths as tragedy
and others as statistics
is a violence itself,
a wound layered in policy,
philosophy,
newsprint,
and careless words.

No passport alters blood’s red,
no flag can ward away grief’s cold hand.
Grief does not inquire of faith –
Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist,
Hindu, Shinto or none at all –
it enters the heart as water finds a crack.
It is the same pain,
the same hollow ache,
the same whispered last prayer.

How loud the world becomes
when we silence some voices –
how easy a wall is built
of indifference and othering.
Behind those walls,
we pretend safety,
while outside,
the numbers grow, the faces multiply.

What cruelty, to measure the worth
of a mother’s wail in headlines,
to assign reports a hierarchy of loss,
to mourn selectively,
teaching children which suffering matters
and which may be brushed aside –
as if some souls weigh more.

And yet, some do – old men in high offices
speak of collateral damage,
of necessary force,
as if the tally of innocence
is simply a question of language
or geography.
As if asphalt or olive trees
could justify the unmarked graves.

No faith calls for supremacy,
no culture sanctifies the blood of the Other.
A thousand sacred texts –
when read with open palms –
reveal only the echo:
each life holds the world entire,
each death carves an absence
the shape of all creation.

To marginalise is not safer,
it is to fracture your own heart,
to look upon a weeping face
and see not a mirror,
but a foreignness worthy of less.
This is the oldest lie,
and it has made exiles of us all.

Today, the bedrock of land
soaked with histories forgotten.
The prayers ascending
windless or weighted –
do not ask the air for a religion,
a citizenship, a dialect.
They rise as one voice: hear us,
see us, let us live.

Our humanity in the end
is not tribal, not chosen,
but shared.
The rescue worker, the father,
the friend who never arrives –
all futures lost fold into the same silence.
We owe the living more than witness:
the moral clarity to say
never again – for any, for all.

Let us cast down any reckoning
that divides tragedy into nations,
measures worth in news cycles
or sits in safety,
assigning blame like currency.
Instead, let us count the living –
each imbued with possibility,
each deserving of sunrise,
each deserving of peace.

For we are gathered in the same,
one trembling world –
not as adversaries,
not as just numbers,
but as a breath shared,
as kin in sorrow and hope.
Let it be enough.
Let the measure always be life.

by Bakchos