HOW MANY DEATHS LATER?

each day
that dawns
we measure time
in terms
of the deaths per minute
in Gaza

how many deaths later
will Time come up for air ?

each midday
when the shadows
are the shortest
the darkness
is the longest

how many deaths later
will Time come up for air ?

each night
the tide of dreams
brings to our door
sleep deprived children
singing in the rubble
to mute
the sound of the bombs
they are alone to hear

how many deaths later
will we wake up to save them ?

GAZA’S STOLEN HUMILITY

“The people are trying to dig and find the bodies they buried.”
– Family member commenting on the desecration by the IDF of a Gaza Cemetery

so many happy-go-lucky children
here
can run carefree
barefooted
in sand
taken for granted

so many of us
here
can ground
our unscorched feet
in
a maternal earth

we have forgotten
how humble
we are
or that
the root meaning
of the word
means
soil

our dead
are at home in their garden
and offered
altars of abiding respect

meanwhile
in Gaza
the sacred soil of the graveyards,
where the martyrs are buried,
are aborted of their bodies
by humility desecrating
Israeli soldiers
and their made-in-USA
bulldozers

only
the Humble own the land

MOURNING WITHOUT BORDERS

For Wadiya Jamal, Ruchell Magee, Mutulu Shakur, Ed Poindexter and Ralph Poynter – all of who died this past year and who so many of us across the pond had to mourn on our own

thanks to those who understand the wrench

we tried mourning the deaths
of the pandemic
by learning to fight the isolation
and the lockdowns
with zoom

hopefully
zoom is here to stay
as we the folks across the pond
seek a way
to mourn our fallen comrades
in the belly of the beast
while we are so far away

without an internet window
i cried yesterday
at my distant vigil for Brother Ralph Poyndexter
as i did for Ruchell Magee, Ed Poindexter
Mutulu Shakur and Wadiya Jamal
all within a year

i understood
a bit of the wrench
our incarcerated must feel
when they are denied
their loved ones’
funeral rites

the capitalists call it
“processing a mourning”
as if
honoring our dead
was
the optimum time
our labor of grief
takes
to turn out expiry date items
out of a machine

but if Mumia teaches us
“there are no borders in consciousness”
then there are no passport or ID requirements
for the ancestors
to be
everywhere
patient and loving
at our side

THE GAZAN WAY OF DEATH

“They ( those who have been killed) have an ID number on the list. It’s not an ID number given by the Palestinian Authority, it’s not an ID number given by the Gazan Ministry of Health – it’s an Israeli ID number”.
– Vijay Prashad. See his full statement below.

” There is no genocide in Gaza because there are no gas chambers there “.
One of the arguments to be used by Israel at the ICJ against South Africa’s case of genocide in Palestine.

many serial killers
are known
to revisit
not only their crime scenes
but their corpses
after the deed
such is the pathological craving
to push the limit
of their power
over lives they despise

the mass killers in Gaza’s genocide
have invented many
cruel and inhumane ways
to skin those
they call human cats –
pulling the land from under their feet,
starving them,
torturing them,
bombing them,
turning all safe places
into zones of target,
leaving them buried alive under the rubble,
withholding bodies
to serve as bargaining chips,
harvesting their organs,
depriving them of a death count,
or if their death is reported
giving them an Israeli ID number,
advertising high falutin’ real estate
to be built over their unmarked graves
( only to say it is graveyard humor)
and
desecrating Gazan cemeteries
to carry away the martyrs –
would it be as trophies
just as American soldiers
brought freedom fighter skulls
back from Vietnam ?

is the Gazan way of death
that close ?

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

HOW MANY DEATHS LATER? | GAZA’S STOLEN HUMILITY | MOURNING WITHOUT BORDERS | THE GAZAN WAY OF DEATH

Poems by renowned Black leader and activist Julia Wright