"The child was declared dead at Gaza's Shifa hospital, and the health ministry said she suffocated after inhaling tear gas." Financial Times.

 

 

At any turning of any year
we confront an unholy nexus of fear,
solstice, equinox;  apex or nadir.

We must ride a crest of darkness,
accept a drunkard's kiss
as the sun squats toad-like on the far horizon.

O! this squandered life
fear cannot be cut out with a knife
but fear transforms
the frosty night owls of winter
Into a travesty of thiis continuing lack of light..

Beneath this peak of dark
house-bound dogs bark
men lie in the slough of despair
mothers bathed in this trough of light
beneath the pinnacle of a death
a child no longer there.

Forged by restless extraordinary lives.
we will never deny our dreams
dead or dying, we never broke, never fled.

Instead, we created the Intifada
to shake off our chains
of a life stripped of all pretence
written as a winter without end
confiscation, control, IDF violence, strife,
children left alone, bereft of hope,
an apogee of regret,

The brow of this hill of calvary.
the very cusp of our salvation
no more Zionist apartheid
 see the skull beneath the skin
the crown of thorns, this ordinary sacrifice
stones against tanks and mirage jets 
a baby born in occupied Palestine,
a place of terror and fear,
sleeps peacefully, in a stable.
so close, so far, so near.