by Nick Moss
“…the poet’s function is to describe , not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen”
– Aristotle, The Poetics
The future Picasso who’d have painted
The Guernica of our age
Lies among the 47,000 dead
Of a 471-day war.
The survivors, returning
To the debris that was once
A home, hear the voices
Of those dead; drop three handfuls
Of soil upon the shattered walls and
Broken floors that form their graves;
Refuse to perfume over
The stink of putrefaction
That the winter storms can’t shift.
In Washington a billionaire
Raises a stiff right hand
To the future-now;
Safe cities, strong borders
And a lacrimator gale.
In Nuseirat camp
Asma Mustafa
A teacher, a mother, thirty-eight
Says “I can’t believe
I have survived. I feel
Like I have written a line
In the history of Palestine.”
And in enduring, mourns
The scarred and tortured dead;
Heralds, for all the living,
That justice still to come.
