Kaddish for Gaza

A powerful and moving piece by one of our members, Harvey Gillman.

Her uncle holds her high like a holy text,

an icon, a sacred scroll of flesh.

He, like an Imam, rabbi, priest of many griefs,

his clothes are rent in lamentation.

The blood of the child will not redeem the land.

Her silence is a call to worship

and we (the faithful?) weep, tear our clothes,

or lower our eyes in anger

or despair.

Breaking of hearts, bitter tears, bleeding eyes,

feet swollen with constant exile.

These the psalms we scarcely dare.

We seek, we say, the sacred in the neighbour’s eye.

Her face, we claim, the face of a silent god.

Out of the tortured mouths of children,

a blessing, a curse to a god who hides.

He holds her high in veneration.

His wounds like stigmata bleed across frontiers,

stain all flags. Her eyes are dying

like the light around. Questions

form on parched lips, exhausted skin.

Wherefore forsaken? By a god and its world.

One people certain with another’s uncertainty,

both bound by the chains of sacred history.

She is beyond weeping, he beyond words.

Somewhere under the distant rubble,

her parents, her brothers lie. And so do we.

We, like the horses of pharaoh, pursuing phantoms,

drown in the mud of the land to be conquered,

a land of milk and honey and the blood of enemies.

This land that devours its children,

this cemetery of unmarked tombs and aspirations.

There is plenty of room in this promised land

to bury both the body and its many dreams.

Are there miracles enough, is there determination,

a recognition of angels beyond frontiers of hatred,

to recall the dying, to heal the wounds,

to make straight the way, to force the god

back to the land forsaken? Before her eyes close,

before he recites the final verses of the holy scroll?