Rafah burns, and I hold my sleeping son
I look at the pictures
Of children
Their smiling faces torn from the bone
Their laughter evacuated
I watch the videos of burning tents, of flesh floating in the wind
I watch them
While I hold my sleeping son on my chest
I feel something like rage
Something like love
Something like fear
And Shame
And outrage
but this feeling is all this and still something different
Something far beyond my emotional vocabulary
I am a poet without language
An empath without root
I am overflowing in something I do not recognize
Something like terror
But still not quite that
I am holding my sleeping son
And a man I will never know
But love all the same
Holds up an infant corpse
His beautiful face
Has been carried off with the last of our humanity
Before I can catch myself I let out a wail
And The sleeping baby in my arms jerks himself awake
And now he cries with me
For Palestine
For the uprooted olive trees
For the shelled hospitals & schools & homes
For the thousands of children
Their parents and loved ones martyred
In a smoldering flame
Their fathers who gather the severed limbs
Like flowers
Mothers who catch their drifting ashes like
sand caught in a gust of terror
My son and I are here
Under an occupation a whole world away
The flames of Rafah smolder before us
I can feel the heat crackling in my blood
And so we — my son and I —
fill this silent world with our wails
Both Feeling something we can’t quite name
