jessica Care moore
(from the book, God is Not an American, Moore Black Press 2009).
I have no windows. No doors in my home. My neighborhood sports clubs, schools, hospitals, are now targets for artillery shells.
Only a generator to keep me connected to the outside World. Remember when wars had rules?
Remember when you could find our land
On any map?
These drones do not see us as people. Our children are not their children.
Their small bodies scattered on the street
torn pieces of paper from a headline.
Empty words and no truth about their story attached to tiny
limbs
blown
off.
Fingers, arms, teenage boies cut in half
This blood is too new to be spilled. Still Finding its way, swimming past young, soft bones.
Hundreds killes. Thousands wounded.
Children are told to hide with their families In schools and then the building is shelle. Innocence stolen and they are left with this moment For eternity. Left alone for days, holding onto the limp bodies
of their dead mothers.
Asking them to wake up. They want to go home. But they are home. What does this mean to the rest of the world. I wonder?
Is democracy at work? What are the hours?
9-5pm?
We can’t tell the night from day
I think freedom is at lunch
Or taking a Monday off to barbeque.
Today I choke in search of fresh air without Shrapnel cutting my tongue.
I eat bombs. I tell myself. They cannot kill me.
I think about God. The God everyone claims they pray to.
Where is God now? Sitting on the North Star? Invading another country as a distraction?
Hiding inside a rocket launcher?
Blowing up a Mosque?
Murder in the name of God.
What is closer to God then children laughing?
Maybe we should begin praying to that sound.
I suppose there were bombs in their lunch boxes as they attempted normalcy by still walking to school.
Or the sisters who were burnt to death In their sleep.
The fireworks are death lights here with no Musical score.
My friend says he hopes if he is killed, His children are killed so they won’t be suffering inside this massacre
of this attack on civilian life
alone.
We understand Toni Morrison.
Beloved are the women who take their chilren with them. Jump off sides Of ships. Rooftops.
To hear a father talk this way…
Anything, but pain and death as a way of life.
One of the Israeli Missiles screams out
“We are not the enemy!” Then tore through the boy of a pregnant woman of two Palestinian boys.
Their mothers promise them change. Now velvet blood and prayer beads cover their mouths and hands.
They die with Allah in their heart.
An their hands towar the sun.
This is not new news. If news at all.
The f16 choppers attacks homes with 20 missiles in less than 5 minutes.
Soldiers march inside my mouth
Slide own my throat
Crawl insie my womb and leave a hand grenade.
So I will feel this war as a birth. But of what?
Of blood? Of children’s bones?
Of decapitation? Of hate?
Of geography?
Occupation always produces violence. But I am asked to speak of peace.
How can I with bombs exploing
killing the unborn and their siblings?
Why is genocide acceptable to some people & not to others?
Holocaust verses holocaust verses holocaust.
The ones they celebrate. The ones they never mention.
I feel as if I am burnt to ash. My shoes being thrown into a pile of others shoes
My ancestors ripped from their homeland and sold like cattle.
The place with God on their money
Are they going to save me now?
Where is America?
In a series of long meetings.
Mourning the loss of the family cat?
There is no place for politics in the face of genocide.
But genocide is political. religious.
How much money to clean the blood off the streets of DC, Texas, Ohio, Baltimore We alreay dead. They think.
Still, we fight without Armor.
Our children’s dead flesh becomes our skin. We wear the mask. Attempt smiles.
three years later……
I don’t jump as much when I hear them. Coming. Falling. Right on my block. I just hold onto to an object, and shake inside and wait for it to be over.
It is never over.
It is freezing cold. I dream of summer. I dream of warm food and a hot shower. I dream of freedom.
In Chicago. In Detroit. In Harlem. In Brooklyn. In Soweto. In Compton. In Oklahoma. In Kansas. In Cuba. In Gaza.
End Apartheid In South Africa. In Alabama. In our education system. In our Subconscious. In Dearborn. In Mississippi. In our judicial system. In our prisons.
In our policies. In our eath chambers. In our min. End apartheid In Gaza Our masjids. Our homes. Destroyed.
In Gaza
Some of our own sit in silence.
In Gaza.
There is no electricity
In Palestine.
There is no water.
Where there is no water, There is no life.
I scrape the blackness of this night/sky on fire
wrap it around myself for shelter.
Tomorrow I will find a cloud for my head.
I will summon a light rain to shower.
God is close. God is coming. Between our breath
Before another bomb calls our name
We will answer back. We will sit in one room. If we die. We die together. No one will be left behind. This is the bravery of God’s people.
We will not cower beneath the rubble of A Rafah Refugee Camp.
We will scream. We will fight.
We will pray injustice in the other direction.
We will find peace in death
If not in life.
Amen.
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