Writers and S&C Cultural Editors Sue Harper and Paul Valentine present two poems both entitled ‘Gaza’.
Sue Harper
Yahweh knocks on your door
there is blood in his hair
his teeth are snaggled
his mottled limbs
knot on the dirt floor
Hear him: ‘an eye
for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth’
See him: a pile of severed arms
(pure genius really), a stagnant pool of tears,
the milkless breasts
He is the ziggurat
the high altar where hearts are ripped out: he is
the anvil too, he is
the rack, the noose. But look!
the boomerang
Paul Valentine
She walks silently through the burnt rubble
Wearing an olive leaf hijab to symbolise
Strength, resilience and perseverance:
To forgo the wickedness of those
Who set their hate against those whose land it was,
Of which only those remain who lost loved ones
On that ghastly night.
She stays to commune with her nearest, now furthest,
To search for some sense, in the idiocy of that moment
And now lives between two worlds – one dead,
The other powerless to be born, and so she spends her time
Hovering both; like a hummingbird without a song.
But in her heart, she knows, as she waits for the dead grass to green,
As metaphor for all else; for new life springs from death, doesn’t it?
Just as green shoots emerge from the parched rancid blackness.
The very finest line from despair and mental anguish –
To hope – wherein lies the emergence of a new dignity.
A dignity that binds all hate.
-And she is there now!
Her form an essential grace: the words very meaning –
From the protection a mother camel gives her young:
She would gladly die saving her own, yet she had no chance
So, she dies anew each new day given to re-live that atrocity.
There is no religion here now, for they look to her,
And though she is now redeemed through fire – she lives elsewhere,
Often thinking; ‘If only men gave birth, life would be so different!’
Image reproduced under a Wikimedia Commons licence.
