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By Roger Cornish
Oh Israel, I’m with
you.
Brought up on the World at War,
read about the pogroms,
my mam told me stories
of great Jews:
Gloria Steinem,
Albert Einstein,
the story of
Anne Frank.
The Holocaust carved into
the collective twentieth-century conscience.
We should never forget.
So what if I could build a mirror—
not some little vanity mirror
but one larger than
the earth’s greatest oceans,
lift it
and hold it up to you.
What would you see?
Would you see the children
in Gaza?
Would you see the rubble
where a home used to be?
Would you see a child
looking for her mother
beneath the concrete?
Are your settlers building
upon foundations
of inhumanity?
Or is this what happens
when history becomes
a weapon?
Is telling truth
Antisemitic?
Are the dead children in Gaza
merely collateral damage?
Look into the mirror.
Can you remember pain?
Can you remember
what it was to be hunted?
Can you remember
the doors that closed,
the trains,
the camps,
the smoke.
Look again.
And somewhere behind you
stand the people
who said:
Never again.
Look into the mirror, Israel.
What do you see?
And can you see
the hands that helped you
survive?
