How Many More Will You Kill Today?

a poem

Original photo by Mohannad Almuqayed

Listen to a reading of How Many More Will You Kill Today?

How many more
will you kill today?
How many more children
will you murder, mutilate,
orphan, starve, traumatize
for the rest of what’s left
of their fragile lives,
their bleak future?

How many more women
will you massacre, widow,
render childless or barren?
How many more mothers and wives
will your cruelty make weep 
and mourn until their hearts bleed out?

How many more men
will you butcher, humiliate, 
imrpison, torture, emasculate?
How many more fathers and husbands
will your savagery fill with rage,
rancour and hatred?

How many more families
will you disrupt, disposses, 
displace and drive from their land
into the desert or the sea?
How many more bloodlines
will you erase from civil records?

How many more journalists
will you slaughter and silence?
How many more doctors and nurses
will you target with snipers, drones, 
robots and boxes rigged to explode?
How many more aid trucks
will you block, plunder and burn?

How many more homes,
schools, mosques, bakeries,
roads, fields, olive groves
will you bomb and obliterate?
How many more safe places 
will you flatten into dust and rubble?
How many more tents
will you set on fire 
in the cold night?

How many more lies
will you fabricate and spread
like blow flies and maggots
to cover up your atrocities?
How many more false accusations
will you level against those
who call you out,
who dare speak the truth?

How many more days,
weeks, months, years
will it take to satiate
your lust for more blood,
your greed for more land,
your rage for more vengeance,
your puffed-up pride?
How much more 
will ever be enough
to pacify your wild beast,
to appease your jealous god?

How much farther
will you push on down
this road of no return?
How much deeper
will you dig your own grave
before you stop?
Or will you never stop 
until you've built your dream 
upon sand soaked
in tears and blood,
upon fields sown
with skulls and bones?

---