Four Poems by Lynda Tavakoli

 

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.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, and is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre. She has won several international poetry and short story awards and been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Lynda’s recent poetry collection ‘A Unison of Breaths’ is published by Arlen House and her digital book with video ‘Unbroken/The Gaza Poems’ is published by Live Encounters Publishing.