By Lillian Rosengarten

What is this strange, strange world where children die?
Question the killers, dark wars. Suffering everywhere. Callous indifference
deadened in pursuit of blood on the ground of Palestine stolen from the living.
Little screams on still faces. I cannot hear you! Speak to me please!
Hundreds of thousands of children, stench of burnt flesh
Life without value as missiles slam
Smoldering in the moonlight.
I am bursting through my skin, dismembered, I am nowhere I am everywhere.
I am your murderer lost soul of deception nailed in a coffin of hate.
I am your mother stooped in grief. I am your father’s vacant eyes.
I am the children. When death stretches its arms to me I sink into the earth
covered in moss and wildflowers.
Remember the spring of our years before a troubled twilight
Lifted its tentacles to crush you in a sea of tears?
Once we held you in our arms to suckle you with tenderness.
I had three children one is dead. I had eight children, four are dead or two or eight
or all of them.

There is a fire burning across the earth.
Burns in my heart smells of ash, smells of death, ash covered flowers
Mixed with the blood of death.
They are all our children and we are their parents.
War, trampler of  the soul. Death to the poets and lullabies.
How do they do it arrogance of the armies?
Philip, do you even know you left last century behind?
After the millennium your beloved twin towers
Melted in flames turned to dust.
Wild with grief we cry for lost children. They were to make a better world,
lift us from this morass, the empty space of ashes.
Nightgown wrapped to suffocate, I tear it from my body soaked in sweat
As if to free myself from death or something else.
I dreamed a fire scorched the earth. Wild woman trapped, hold me I am cold.
Ism’al our child, how cruelly you were taken
I am your spirit mother guarding a legacy.
Is the world listening?

Bisan, Mayar Aya and Nur Abuelaish, you are all our dead children.
Now we shall be your storytellers your painter of dreams. We will paint your canvas
Filled with small details, rich memories.
We must be the keepers of the earth.

– Lillian Rosengarten, a refugee from Nazi Germany is a Buddhist practitioner, poet, writer and a pacifist. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact her at: truthpoem@gmail.com.