GAZA: SONG OF THE PSALMIST KING
Looking up, in the pockmarked morning light
Raven black parachutes take flight,
Their silken heartstrings taut,
To billow, then suddenly fill, before
Catching an onshore breeze
Across the Philistine sea, the Syrian sea,
Then drifting slowly, ever slowly, down, down
From the blue, blue skies,
Towards Adamah: to resuscitate,
To commiserate; to compensate;
Or like me, too late, to improvise.
Watching, waiting, baiting
Kach vultures, gyps kahane, salivating
Hover, spreadeagled haut;
No longer concealed, or poisoned.
The secret nakam cabals, brought
In a vortex of morbid descent,
Wind within wind, Hate within Hate,
The Hell circles of Dante’s fate.
From the blue, blue skies.
They dip wings in the salt sea brine,
Then eviscerate,
Sightless children’s eyes.
Revenge, retribution, punishment,
The Song of Moses and the psalmist King:
Seeking
An ending as old as Time.
Time is weary though,
Of a rendered past, present and future:
A putrid creature
As old as Time.
A blood libel some profane,
Or blood lust more maintain,
The Eretz response
To Amalek’s bursting forth from the ghetto,
Defiling, dismembering the female deity;
Dinah, Shekhinah, the maidens of Kfar Aza,
And all our humanity.
A Biblical reprise,
From the blue, blue skies
Masked butcher shrikes
And whining drones
With David’s song, in their hearts,
Impale equal innocents of Abraham’s flock,
On the thorns and exposed steel
Of Gaza’s insanity.
A chorus of a high-pitched squeal,
And our lost humanity.
All is fallow there now, razed within.
Philistia’s ground levelled with glycerin,
And the caterpillar tracks of tanks.
Where once an Ottoman Sultan’s whim,
Turgha, did dictate,
The Knesset will imitate,
And not hesitate,
To steal more land from before time,
The end of Time.
To then settle there, a vultures’ roost
On dead olive trees.
