Eyeless in Gaza

 

Eyeless in Gaza

 

('Finish him off Smokey') Smokey Howson on tv

Recalling his war.

 

I watch his sad eyes, this old man

In his nineties -

An Aussie who had fought in the jungles

Of New Guinea against the Japs.

He had stared into the eyes of the dying man

Before he shot him:

'I have seen those eyes ever since.'

Only dementia or death, it seems,

Will absolve him from the judgment

Of his own sleeping conscience -

Which woke when war was done.

 

How easy to kill from a distance.

From a high-powered jet it's more like a game –

And no one weeps a thousand feet away.

How straight forward it is to destroy Hamas,

The Angel of Death in fancy dress.

But when a soldier stumbles in the rubble

And comes across a dead or dying child,

Does he look into the eyes of another

From a different tribe, or the eyes

Of a child who could have been his brother?

To know my deed...

 

'To know my deed . . .'

 

Clad in his bright, shining uniform

The general faced the tv camera

And pronounced his verdict:

 

'We don't bomb civilians, we bomb Hamas' -

For Israel is a civilised state

Attacked by barbarians driven by hate.

.

I guess that this man wants to ask:

Why do you not see that we are fair –

And the enemy is foul?

 

For once more the Jew is the untermensch.

The years were swept away like grime, no doubt,

When desperate souls entered Kfar Aza.

 

To find – one more KZ* strewn with bodies.

An unfathomable nightmare of men

Damning themselves by their own foul deeds.

 

But the fair, it seems, can tear a world apart

And still be fair –

Hard not to  hear Macbeth's lament:

 

'To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.'

 

*German concentration camp

 

 

 

 

Passover

 

Passover  

In my dreams I see her in the ruins -

A mystified ghost:

How could such misery be in a place

With no crooked cross, savage dogs,

‘Rause Jude’, or men in black

With eyes as dead as stone?

 

Crooked bodies, dead in the dust -

Deformed and mutilated children

Cry for their mothers, as men and women

Cry for their God –

But heaven, as always, does not

Take their part.

 

Neither do the powers that be –

There is no oil or gold in Gaza,

Nor blue-eyed angels broken on a wheel.

Only stragglers, dark shadows

Calling on a god unseen in the universal

Language of pain.

 

She has heard these cries before,

A lost Anne Frank who died a child defiled.

Does she pray again, I wonder -

Ask her god to banish from the sky

The angel of death who scorns the blood

As it drops its bombs on a different brood?

Initial Thoughts

 

The terrible attack by Hamas on October 6th 2023 was committed by a 

fundamentalist group who knew what they were doing, and what  the 

consequences would be.  But I doubt that they anticipated the extent 

of the response.  Hamas is a terrorist group, but Israel is a state - 

with a state's power - backed by the Americans.

 

I have to ask myself: what would the Jews who suffered under the 

terrible reign of the Third Reich think if they could see the death 

and destruction in Gaza? An impossible question certainly. 

But my first poem Passover suggests a poetic answer. 

 

I also offer two other poems.