PHANTOM PAIN BLUES

So many children killed or wounded in Gaza - made in USA — So many children killed or wounded in Gaza – made in USA.

a young boy
now missing one hand
waves his bandaged stump
and
managing a smile
says
“my hand is in heaven
it beat me there”

a young girl
still wincing
tries to convince herself
that all children have a right to
arms
as she mourns the one
she has buried

all the limbless
in Gaza
have to suffer
the electricity
of excruciating phantom pain

may
all the empire builders
those who have lost
the limbs of empathy
suffer
the phantom pain
of an absent heart

A MEMORIAL LULLABY

to the artist, Behn Samareh with thanks

“there is no such thing as emptiness”
Thich Nhat Hanh

You are
a white haired elder –
your face is deeply lined
with ravines
reminding us
of the holes you drill
in the face of the sand –
one for every child
killed in Palestine

from your eyes
you try to wipe
the tears
that,
like the waves,
water the holes
of your memorial

you say
none of the children
now gone
made a lasting impression
on the earth
and
the same will be true
of your fleeting landscape

from the air
your memorial
is a hollow-stitched quilt
puncturing
the beach
with the farflung sorrow
we are left with

you
are determined
to continue to drill
as long as the zionists
kill

you have created a tradition
and
thanks to your rite of burial,
thanks to the full
uninterrupted visual
of rows and rows
of emptiness –
Mother Earth
will cradle
and nurture
one by one
the sacred presence
of each baby ancestor

gazing from above
at the moonscape
of your Gaza cemetery
we know that
wounded healing
is the only
way out of
the impossible mourning
of genocide

you are a loving Sisyphus
relentlessly puncturing
a manicured bland beach
with thousands of holes –
the traces of a toll
that the zionists hope
will be washed away
by the waves
of forgetfulness

but
it is our memory
that will become
stone-written

and
we recall the buckets
of sand
the departed children
dug out of Gaza beach
to build their castles
of joy

you draw for us
the intersection
between loss and art
where letting go
of counting
endless bones
to make room for the song
we share,
we will create the space
for
the only thing that counts :
a new old
collective start

Please watch his visualized burial ground here:

ANEMOIA

to my son Malcolm with whom i discovered a word as unknown to me as Atlantis – Anemoia

to his great great uncle Silas Hoskins who was lynched in Elaine Arkansas in 1916 and whom Malcolm understands to have anemoia for …

this soil
as it shakes and erupts
is rich
with shoots of ancient memory
and each step we take
will be in tribute
to the time lapse
between
what the ancestors
we love
but never met
created
and
what we now manifest

each of our prayers
all of our vibrations
have already
invented a new language
where
words the empire builders denigrated
like
lawn mowing
human animals
coons
will be relegated
to a glossary
of prehistory

the other day
i learned
a new beautiful word –
anemoia –
which means
the longing,
the love
for what
was never experienced

even as i type
my corporate-complicit computer
rejects the word
and instructs me that i meant
anemia

these hours
are glasses
where
moments
of bloodied sand
pass
in slow motion
to become
grains
of new unprecedented flowers

may they be called
Anemoia

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

PHANTOM PAIN BLUES | A MEMORIAL LULLABY | ANEMOIA

Poems by renowned Black leader and activist Julia Wright