Under the Rubble

an updated poem that I published one year ago

Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash

Listen to a recording of Under the Rubble:

Every day, all day, 
starving, dark-eyed children crowd 
against wire fences and hold out
battered pots, filthy pans, 
dirty bowls and bottles,
to be handed a bit of food, 
a drop of water.

Wounded children with no surviving family
lose their limbs in bomb blasts, 
die in agony of burns and injuries
no nurse or doctor can soothe or treat
in a barely functioning shell of a hospital
as they battle their own exhaustion,
hunger and helplessness.

Malnourished pregnant women miscarry
or give birth without anesthetic or medication
in open streets, in public toilets, in cars,
on bloody floors to stillborn or underdeveloped babies
their dry breasts cannot feed.
Forced to strip and remove their veils,
women and young girls are touched 
by soldiers who threaten rape,
and call them bitches and whores. 

Unarmed men are rounded up, stripped, 
zip-tied, and loaded onto trucks
and taken no one knows where.
Young boys waving a white flag
are droned or shot and bulldozed
into the sand or left on the ground
for roaming dogs to feed on.
Medics and emergency workers are executed
with their hands and feet tied and
buried along with their vehicles.
Another journalist is shot in the head
or buried alive in a tent.

Displaced, disrupted families are driven
from one safe zone to the next safe zone
where more displaced, disrupted families
shelter in plastic tents, seek refuge
in streets running with sewage 
and choking with refuse and detritus,
where there is no aid, no food, no fuel,
no clean water, no electricity, 
no hope.

Every day, all day,
we see on our screens
if we’re looking, 
we hear Gaza, if we’re listening,
crying, screaming, pleading, 
praying for the world’s help.
But where shall help come from?

While world leaders strut and pose,
feign outrage and bewilderment,
yet supply Israel with more weapons;
while the President welcomes a war criminal
with open arms and entertains ethnic cleansing
as the right choice, as a final solution,
the walls are tumbling around us,
the ceiling is crashing down on our heads,
the floor is crumbling beneath our feet,
and we are trapped under the rubble
of our sick civilization, 
we are gasping, gulping for air.

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