The Palestine Chronicle is pleased to feature these short poems contributed by Pina Piccolo, Frieda Groffy and Vi Ransel.
Mahmoud
By Pina Piccolo
For Mahmoud Darwish, whispering his soul over Gaza
You were taken by a merciful death, Mahmoud
Lest phosphorous devour your heart
A chorus of stones answered
As the Strip lay awash in wrath
And a swallow looked and wept
As the bricks came unwrapped
And the song of ages drowned
The knocks of unmanned flight
As a tribe of pigeons cooed a baby alone
To sleep through the night
And the ghosts of the olive groves bereft of poet
Sang the Buraq back to life.
***
Requiem for Gaza
By Frieda Groffy
Standing on top of
The Hill of Shame
They watch the slaughter
Unmoved they comment
Without mercy or empathy
Shocked I think what is gone wrong
With the people of Israel
Did they loose their souls
Dont they see they look into the
Mirror of history and perceive the
Reflection of the horror they endured
The victim that becomes the oppressor
But still keeps victimizing themselves
This should be the time the mothers of Israel
Say a prayer of Kaddish for the mothers
Of Palestine, tear their clothes in mourning
And cover their heads with ashes
How else can the hate ever vanish
And love and peace prevail?
– Frieda Groffy is a Belgian poet and journalist. She published seven volumes of poetry.
***
Gotterdammerung – Poem
By Vi Ransel
The little pieces
of shredded Palestinian children
fall as lightly on the conscience
of Europeans and Americans
as the dust from the crematoria
on the neat-as-a-pin flower boxes
brushed off daily by German hausfraus
living in the shadows of Dachau and Auschwitz.
These tiny human sacrifices
to nationalism and dominion
are as remote and dim as the cold light
from Alpha Centauri amid
an obscene frenzy of slopping at the trough
of narcotized consumerism designed to make us complicit
and to numb the vestigial morality of the most arrogant know-nothings
to grace the world’s stage since Caligula,
indoctrinated since infancy with entitlement and exceptionalism
via fables and demonization fed to us by our parents,
school’s daily boosters of pledges of allegiance
and the continuous, intra-ocular injection
by the corporate media
of its creation, the Great Satan
of TV advertising and Public Relations.
As we, the comfortable and gluttonous, wallow
in beer, NASCAR and any sport that involves balls,
and shop for a lifestyle while "living" like empty bags
waiting to be filled with whatever is dangled
in front of our faces,
as we, the ignorant and insulated, fixate
on whitening our teeth and erasing lines from our faces
in order to avoid looking into the mirror and being mocked
by a moldering portrait of Dorian Grey,
as we stick I-pods and cell phones into our ears
that make it impossible to hear anything about the deal
we’ve made with the devil, or had made in our names,
since we might have to re-think the claims that we’ve made
not to hear the crying of our brothers’ children dying
as they reap what we have sown,
exploding in red-dripping shards of flesh
and white, jagged splinters of bone,
coalescing in the fetid pool of the West’s
sophisticated and cynical indifference,
while we suck contentedly on the TV tit
and swallow the murderous poison
of its corporate ejaculate.
* * * * *
Wounded Knee and America’s Peculiar Institution
of kidnapping Africans and forcing them into slavery,
established a template for institutionalized brutality
whereby we broke every treaty that was signed in our names
as we settled and slaughtered our way across the continent
to establish an empire stolen by means of atrocities
committed with Manifest Destiny’s self-delegated authority
wrapped up in flag-waving dressed as democracy.
As Americans slaughtered and slaved their way into history
they embraced genocide as their moral duty and a mandate
in bearing the White Man’s Burden of civilizing the inveterate savages
who were already cluttering up the "American" landscape
when the looters and plunderers stepped off the boat
on to Plymouth Rock, and like Columbus before them
commenced spattering innocent brain matter, scalps, blood and bones
all over the undeveloped real estate and resources they coveted.
Meanwhile European Zionism,
living parasitically within Judaism,
went the Americans one better and used
the Jews’ suffering in order to hijack a religion,
putting the plight of Europe’s victims in service to their plans
for ruthless ethnic cleansing and acquisitive nationalism.
You need a plan in order for genocide to work,
otherwise mass murder is just an impromptu massacre.
Before 1900 major newspapers expressed
the interests of the imperialists who owned them.
Smaller efforts were local, community "bulletin boards"
or showcases for movement-oriented editorials.
And where there were no newspapers
there were only traumatized refugees’ stories,
often dismissed as lying or lunacy because
torture, mass murder and rape as a weapon
are not the methods of Western democracies.
(And if they were, it would be to confer the virtues
of freedom, representative government and the "free" market.)
As media outlets expanded from print to telegraph
to radio to TV and to cell phones,
communication had become so instantaneous, in fact,
that content had to be very carefully controlled
by the cabal of imperialist interests that owned them
by consolidating the outlets, especially in the US,
where people are weaned on vapid, contentless propaganda,
and engineered to be the most incredibly ignorant
dumb asses on the face of the planet.
Paradoxically in Israel, newspapers print the truth
about Zionists meting out Special Treatment 14f13,
mashing Gaza with spectacular impunity
for the cheap thrill of racial "superiority"
and establishing racially-pure Jewish communities.
The names of the perpetrators are interchangeable,
but all of them serve just one purpose,
grinding the poor into financial fertilizer
in service to the Masters of the New World Order
as they make War on Humanity both military and financial
in their campaign for land, power and resources.
And as the West has its smug, self-satisfied,
self-righteous fat face deservedly slapped
by the market’s invisible hand, it may serve,
with the internet, to awaken people to the fact
that the poor of the world
– THIS MEANS YOU!!! –
are all living on one giant Gaza-like reservation,
and the world’s billionaires are preparing to remove
all us "useless eaters" via some Nazi-like "re-location"
by means of multiple mass genocides,
not excluding a Nuclear Holocaust,
which will awaken the wrath of The Furies,
who punish unpunished atrocity.
And as Earth begins to self-destruct in defiance of her rape,
Alecto, Magaera and Tisiphone, will speak
for the voiceless dead who have been discarded,
and billionaires will secrete themselves
with the seeds of all the world’s plant species
locked in explosion-proof vaults, a mile below the ice under Svalbard.
– Vi Ransel works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).
