A destroyed mosque in the Jabalia area, Gaza Strip, Palestine
By Christopher Norris
- Netanyahu in the Knesset
(After Geoffrey Hill, ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’)
I love my nation, hate its enemies. Trump
Is childish, tantrum-prone. G-d looks away;
Stuff happens. ‘Second Holocaust’, some say.
What price clean hands if voting figures slump?
One tip I’d give: people, don’t waste your grief
On dead kids, widows, orphans. They too serve
To steel our soldiers, give our cause new nerve.
Should I, God’s scourge, bow to some legal brief?
- The Pulpit-Poets: a monorhyme
Hear how those pulpit-poets fill the air
With hateful rhetoric; with calls to share
Some vile blood-curdling sentiment that they’re
God-vouchsafed to convey; with stuff they dare
Pass off as ‘poetry’ that shows no care
For verse-craft, structure or creative flair;
And – worst of all – with thoughts that might just bear
A skim-read but turn out the cherished fare
Of those who’ll hear the poem and declare
‘That’s great!’, then offer up a fervent prayer
(‘God save America’), and promptly swear
Allegiance to that demagogue up there,
To Donald Trump, to Israel, to whate’er
New genocidal binge or droit de guerre
The Prez dreams up to spread death and despair,
By God’s decree, to far-flung regions where
The smoking ruins strike some billionaire
As worth acquiring since he’s cash to spare
And pulpit-poets lined up to prepare
For Netan-Joshua’s latest trumpet-blare.
- A Curse on Arthur Balfour
There is a green hill far away;
‘The Hill of Zion’, it’s called,
Though not by those who spend each day
Beneath its slopes, close-walled.
‘Our land of old’, the Zionists claim,
‘Ours by Jehovah’s will,
For how else should it bear our name,
That immemorial hill?’
We Palestinians say ‘not so:
You came in ’48,
Just eighty-or-so years ago –
With Britain’s lapsed Mandate!
Since then it’s been your way to make
Them up, the ‘facts’ you need,
No matter if the history’s fake
Or tweaked to fit your creed.
Our land you’ve ravaged, homes destroyed,
With hospitals and schools,
And crops laid waste till it’s a void
Where desolation rules.
It’s what your holy book requires:
Kill every mother’s son,
Let daughters, children, aged sires
And babies die, each one.
Your ‘native tongue’? A Hebrew forged
Anew, a ‘shibboleth’,
Like that on which the Jordan gorged
When each tongue-slip meant death.
You raze our mosques, museums, sites
Where scholars might retrieve
The history that should, by rights,
Be ours to glimpse and grieve.
For there’s no ruse you won’t devise,
No strategy so base
You’d balk at should it furnish lies
Or ways of saving face
For prisoners raped, reporters slain,
Brave medics double-tapped,
Peace-envoys blitzed, and – yet again –
School-buildings booby-trapped.
There’s green hills here, there, everywhere,
So let’s not blame the Jews
Back then for having done their share
To let the frail taboos
Of man’s humanity to man
Fall prey to the decrees
Of scriptures framed to suit some clan
With land or slaves to seize.
They’re all deep-dyed in blood, those three
Chief monotheistic creeds,
And it’s to Christianity
The deepest blood-trail leads.
But think: just nine decades since they,
The German Jews, endured
What now, as predators not prey,
They practice, self-inured.
Quoth Auden, ‘Those to whom evil’s done
Do evil in return’,
Though of the instances there’s none
That’s quite so harsh to learn
As Israel’s using every means
To make of Palestine
One more test-ground for war-machines
Hot from the Moloch line.
Let those two never be divorced,
Their kinship not denied,
The Nakba and the Holocaust,
Lest, on some far hillside,
Some other genocidal cause
Make Lebensraum its right
To clutch at Bronze Age scriptural straws
To arm it for the fight’.
