The familiar knot I’ve carried
It’s been loud in the way it’s
Crumpled my words, turned me in on myself.
It’s a familiar loop; one flowing through my tissues
My family, my lineage
Many of the communities that I have or do call home.
Violence thrives with stifled voices.
The way our silence lets it fester in the dark
Only to resurface, recycling horrors
Ones we vowed would be never again.
If we don’t speak of it, its legacies
Its cancer flourishes in the quiet.
I often return to the morning of October 8th.
Waking from a COVID slumber in isolation,
The wave of certainty of what was to come leveled me.
Screamed in the terrorist rhetoric, the lack of nuance
At the beginning, my feet, my hands, my voice
A united front against what we knew would and has followed.
Now I start most mornings, nearly two years later, entering the sea
Reels and images of starvation, bombs, brutality
I take it in, berating myself for not doing enough
Then the question of what else can be done echoes,
The lump swells in my throat
& I roll throughout my day.
I wonder what it says about me,
That I’m learning to move about my life
Amidst waves of forced starvation,
Aid-seeking brothers and sisters in Palestine murdered for daring to attempt to feed one another.
What it means that my voice that once bled in the streets,
Shouting “LET GAZA LIVE”
Now speaks feebly, infrequently about the horrors.
I’m grateful I’m not yet numb to masses being starved by design.
I’m instead growing accustomed to the ache, forgetting to name or acknowledge it.
My spirit along with so many is cracking under the witnessing, overwhelming powerlessness.
As a person who’s paid taxes that built and shipped tools enabling this genocide
One of many descendants of Irish diaspora, misnamed Great Hunger
I’ve failed alongside the rest of the world to prevent this unfolding.
The sense of responsibility, it’s suffocating.
The well of grief and guilt, handed down from my mother & hers
It runs from the palms of my feet into the earth.
The lump softens as I remember
The intensity of feeling comes with my ancestors’ knowing
Violence is what empires are built on.
May the siege end & the powers that be
Make contact with the crumbs of humanity they’ve not yet buried.
May Gazans return to their remaining olive groves & aide flood Palestine.
As I type those last bits, I hear that whisper that says “We’re too late.”
But, there’s another voice inside me that hopes
It’s never too late to hold on to the goodness inside of each of us
That knows every inch of this is wrong.
FREE PALESTINE.
