#7: what we talk about when we don't talk about gaza

or look away

Artist: Issam Ayash

Arabic translation: In this place kernels of wheat sprout from the blood of martyrs.

Source: The Palestine Poster Project Archives

/

I have never seen smiling faces turn to coarse, ashen rubble.

I have never lived through a reign of monsters.

I have never watched a region ablaze from a screen.

I have never seen a genocide being livestreamed.

I have never seen bodies spliced asunder.

I have never seen children shattered beneath roofs.

I have never seen dead babies neatly stacked in rows.

I have never seen a people armed solely with the weapon of survival.

I have never witnessed pleas for decorum amid mass slaughter.

I have never seen little kids shaking uncontrollably in my life.

Nor have I ever seen bodies covered in soot.

I have never seen a quarter, square, avenue painted red.

I have never seen a child, when picked up, turn to debris.

I have never seen babies being born to the sounds of bombing instead of the azaan.

I have never seen people my age, younger, older, beg for the right to live, to be alive.

I have never seen a grieving people fight tooth and nail for the living.

I have never seen pets mourning, being mourned.

I have never seen a land crack open in the thirst for water.

I have never seen hospitals, schools, lifelines, denote cartographies of erasure.

I have never seen buildings fall with clouds of smoke towering above.

I have never seen the glow of missile flashes light urbanscapes.

I have never seen plumes of smoke replace a blue sky.

I have never woken up to posts by people saying “I am still alive, for now.”

I have never seen anyone tremble to the threat of real, living Palestinian intifada.

I have never been inside a pitch black hospital.

I have never seen bakeries as sustenance, or as likely targets.

I have never seen reprobates lie so brazenly to the world.

I have never seen death relent;

but neither will resistance.

/