By Lillian Rosengarten

Palestine! You call to me with whispers of pain.
You speak of lost poets, children who cry for lost parents, lost teachers
lost childhoods, dreams torn  from their roots, mangled in a desert gone dry.
In this place, water is poisoned, air putrid from the blood belly of war
There is no escape, only sleep ravished by nightmares or death.

I want to hear your poetry
and tell you mine.
I want to look into your eyes and see myself in you.
Down!  Down beneath the graves I hear your cries
Muffled in a shroud of deception. You don’t exist.

Israel, you are no longer my Israel.
You punish those you call Arabs, dirty Arabs.
Sad peoples of Palestine spit on and defiled, kept behind a wall.
Oh ghetto of Israel, I ache for the reviled proud Palestinians, our brothers and sisters.
But most of all I ache for you, for you know not what you do. 

– Lillian Rosengarten was the only American on board the Irene to Gaza. She contributed this poem to the PalestineChronicle.com.