From bombed out rubble
your stories, your songs
rise like nightingales
with scorched wings
to sing lullabies
for tiny hands and feet
sticking out
from smashed concrete,
to sing the wail
of families convulsed with grief
cradling babies
in white shroud sheets,
to sing the cries
of children too terrified to sleep,
too traumatized
to play, to speak.
Your poems
of bodies in the streets of Gaza
rhyme the barracks of Auschwitz,
the ghetto of Warsaw.
Death stalked you, terror
targeted you who decried, defied
the industrial scale horrors
of genocide.
Amidst occupation’s carnage
you were a truthteller, a seer
in service to humanity.
May your unbent courage,
resilient as Palestine’s dear olive trees
seed new generations
of writers braving fear
fighting to be free.