HIS MOTHER’S HAND
For photojournalist Abdel Raheem Khader
On paper, his list
is forty people long,
a family reach of names
he had one day pencilled
on the page but now become
a grisly hundred metre
washing line of war.
He wants to tell you
of his need to find
their bodies whole,
to hug them, bury them,
say a last goodbye to them,
for only this, he thinks,
can offer comfort to his pain.
Near a neighbour’s door
he finds her hand -
his mother’s hand,
the fingers gently curled
like an unfolding
blossom of a smothered rose
that seeks the light.
He will plant its message
in that boneyard of despair
where only hope must grow -
that place where limb to limb,
his peoples merge again
in wholeness incomplete,
and for the present, it must be enough.
GRAVEYARD OF THE LIVING
Tents stand choked between tombstones,
cold slabs a strange solace for the living
with eyes fixed to Mecca,
souls already cradled in the afterlife.
Here, desperation finds a final space
for the displaced as families pitch homes
amongst the already dead, and heaven
echoes only with a vacancy of stars.
Here, children rest their cheeks
upon the laps of sleep
to dream of rooms
where once a curvature
of letters draped themselves
like cantilevers on the page
and learning threaded tapestries
through eager veins.
Yet now the teachings in this place
are merely carved on flattened stone,
the names a soundless witness
to an unknown fate,
beholding nothing more
than decades made of promises
that died with every crashing wave
upon poor Gaza’s stolen shores.
A BOMB BASKS IN A LIVING ROOM
I remember once, a bomb blew up
the innards of our town
a mile or so from where we lived.
I’d been sitting in our living room
and watching telly with the family,
the evening news, as usual,
blasting out the hottest stories
of the day on Belfast streets,
when suddenly six hundred pounds
of hatred made its own arrival
to our relatively peaceful lives.
Next morning daddy took us down
to see the aftermath and to wisely
keep his counsel to himself,
for gentleness was his tool of war
and nothing else.
In Mr Muin Al-Hatto’s Gaza city home
an unexploded ornament of war
lies beached inside his living room.
With the sleekness of a shark
it stretches its two thousand pounds
of ill intent across the rubbled floor,
a slumbering timebomb with a name:
Mark84/Mod4 – 2000 lbs,
writ large upon its mottled skin.
I wonder what a father thinks
when every substitute for shelter
offers up its same bleak consequence.
Better then to live or die
amongst the dregs of home,
and recognise their truth in all
its particles of enforced misery.
THE COLOUR OF ASH
Her streets may wear your uniform of war,
but the colour of ash
is not Gaza,
the colour of ash
will always be
you.
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