The Gaza Stripped
Goodbye my husband
Goodbye my lover
father mother sister brother
Palestine all that was mine
Goodbye my other
Goodbye pretense
goodbye innocence
Goodbye anything
that ever made any sense
Goodbye earth
sky sun and moon
Don’t ask why death
comes too soon
Goodbye ticking bombs clocks with no hands
a world that buries its head in
the sand
That scrolls and
stares into thin air
while they take what they want
How much do you care?!
So watch me
strip down to the quick
Next year’s pic on your Netflix
Tune
in zoom in feel no shame
(no
cover charge)
Let
me entertain you
Watch as I bare my soul
my arms my legs
Enter me here Hear
me beg
See them tear off half my
face
as they remove their veil
erase our race
You buyers sellers
traders of breath
what
will you give me for a pound of flesh?
Our open wounds the mouth of our red sea
screaming to the sound of
rockets What’s left of me?
A river of blood a
flood of tears out of every pore
while you count your money
line your pockets
What am I bid for
these blind empty sockets?
What more do you want
what more!
You’ve tortured
you’ve lied you’ve occupied
Our home once free
and green is dying
And you with your vengeful
genocide
your plutocracy
your hypocrisy
have
reduced rubble to the obscene
Branches burning
felled olive limbs
our names
engraved upon our skin
Skin stretched across your
drums of war
Hear us
roar Hear us roar
Beat your chest
roll your eyes
scroll past death
like dust we rise
You think there’s nothing
left? Surprise!
You haven’t seen anything yet!
The
cries of our children
echo
through the terrain Their pain
their
empty hands their dear crushed fingers
spring
forth like roots from the earth
All
that remains of worth will linger
Every
year a rebirth
So stroll past
scroll past
But not so fast
We are all just passing through
In another life you could be me
I pray
I'll never be you
I try to forgive
with my last breath
You take that too
lest I forget
all that I love
all that's unspoken
Goodbye my heart
my
broken heart
my aching heart
my breaking heart
Goodbye my bro ken
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko was first introduced on
the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary James Meary Tambimuttu of
Poetry London–-publisher of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller and Bob
Dylan, to name a few. his death, it was his friend, the late great Kathleen
Raine, who took an interest in her writing and encouraged her to publish.
A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and a former San
Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, she is widely published. Her work has appeared
in (among others) XXI Century World Literature (which she represents
France) and Maintenant : Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and
Art archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and New
York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is the recipient of two grants: one from
Poets in Need, of which Michael (100 Thousand Poets for Change) Rothenberg is a
co-founder; the second—the 2018 Generosity Award bestowed on her by Kathleen
Spivack and Joseph Murray for her outstanding service to international writers
through SpokenWord Paris where she is Writer/ Poet in Residence. Her
collected poems On the Way to Invisible is forthcoming in 2024.
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