Gaza Stripped
(a villanelle poem)
Article voiceover
In a couple of years on the Gaza Strip sea-view apartments will slowly arise owned by the wealthy…, and ever so hip Palestinian blood? Merely a blip of history’s shit with the media lies in a couple of years on the Gaza Strip And then will arrive a cruise-liner-ship spilling its tourists and drug-lords and spies all posing as wealthy, dressed ever so hip The past will be screwed through a tightened lip which views as taboo the carnage and cries in a couple of years on the Gaza Strip The vile God of Abram has struck with his whip to genocide Neighbours … yes, money still buys the lives of the wealthy — it’s ever so hip This poem’s too much? You’re quite free to skip … read something else where nobody dies in a couple of years on the Gaza Strip owned by the wealthy who shoot from the hip.
(© Joshua F.D Bond)
Villanelle works; may it haunt the future, if this were to come about. Not all the concrete in all the world will wipe away the sin. Pray there will be olive groves again on whatever thin un-poisoned
soil might be spread and that there will be sandcastles on the beach again and peace to stroll the garden streets at evening.
Old Wars lost to Memory
Horror fades
and with it our dignity.
Bright lights dazzle the
victory parade.
Old films are coloured,
re-rendered from black-and-white.
Grey faces becoming flesh,
Insects in amber, frozen in time.
These are our captured moments,
brittle facts caught in the mind.
Awash as photographs developing
in chemicals that form and fade.
These jagged feelings,
remembering impersonal terrors,
that steal our oxygen,
cannot remain.
So we stand
outside the window looking in.
Waiting for the train, or the plane,
that will take us away.