Listen to a reading by Tim Foley:
In the suburbs they live with animals in their homes
who they treat like people and love like children
while ignoring real children in Gaza.
They’ll take a baby dog away from its mother
and hack its ancient canine conditioning
to mistake a western nuclear family for its wolf pack
in order to fill the void in their hearts
which yearns for unconditional love,
all while hoarding their own love
so far deep in their chest caves
that they cannot feel anything for a Palestinian burn victim
in a bombed-out hospital
who is screaming because there’s no painkiller.
We have so far isolated ourselves from nature
that we need to fill our homes with potted plants
and docile, domesticated animals
just to feel whole.
We drink our wine and chuckle at memes
and talk to our dogs like we talk to babies
while the world turns to fire
and feral dogs feast on corpses in Gaza.
These last 14 months have shattered me.
Shattered me beyond the power of recollection.
But sometimes it’s good to be shattered.
Sometimes it’s good to be dashed to the floor
and cracked wide open
so that life can get a word in.
Sometimes the heart must be broken
to smash through the calluses and cataracts
which accumulate on its surface
and return us to our original tenderness.
This world will break your heart
and then pour plant medicine into the cracks.
It will show you a dead Palestinian child,
and then show you a white kite in the sky.
It will drop you to your knees screaming in anguish,
cursing a God you don’t even believe in,
bawling your eyes out,
only to open them and stare in wonder
at a dandelion growing through the cracks in the concrete.
It will annihilate everything you believed about humanity
in a blazing holocaust,
and then leave you blinking and bewildered
in a mysterious universe of unfathomable beauty,
the rusted chains of preconception
incinerated from your eyes.
Again and again and again
we are shattered to dust and scattered to the wind
by the cruelty of this world,
slowly learning that,
if we can fully surrender to the shattering,
it will return us to that primordial clarity
we abandoned long ago
when we set out to create this mess
in the first place.
Let yourself be shattered
by heartbreak, by loss, and by Gaza.
Let your whole universe
be reduced to ashes.
Let it all die away,
and then stand up,
and rejoin the fight,
eyes no longer clouded
by anything that could be destroyed
by truth.
_______________
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Let's have steely wills and soft hearts, strong minds and eyes that weep and yet see clearly through the disinformation, fabrication and lies. We will not forget, nor forgive these bastards for every child who was killed. For what crime was she killed? They must answer.
The father
The father slowly gathers
the pieces, one by terrible
one: small shreds left of a
child - flesh, brain, sodden
matter, a hand intact but
for one, tiny missing finger.
All dressed in the grey
dust of destruction.
The plastic bag begins
to fill, and then a foot,
wearing the colourful
sock she loved so much;
that broken, delightful
child who would smile
no more. The stones
sighed as he moved them,
dribbling out more for
him to find, to gather, to
bring together in shattered
form. And watching him,
unseen, a shining figure in
flowing robes, untouched
by the carnage, and he too
collected, the broken pieces
of Palestine and placed them
gently in the laps of the crones,
who took silver needles in
silent stitching, weaving back
together, the heart, soul and
purpose of ancient, weeping
Palestine - this Holy Land,
torn asunder by hate and
rage, but never destroyed,
just broken, waiting to be
remade in the image of God.