This weeks poem comes from a site which I subscribe to, called ‘A Poem a Day’ run by The UA based Poetry Foundation. I found it one of the most moving things I’ve read about the horror that is being inflicted on Gaza at the moment.

Summer (’16) Rachel Tzvia Back 

1
The cyclamens have a hard time
breathing in July.

The sun ravages them and earth
is too dry.

Still, try remembering March light
and the tight

deep-buried bulbs that somehow
do not die.

2
The children are scattered
like weeds.

The children are scattered dust-colored
dirt-covered

like weeds. Mid-summer grey reigns,
and rain

exists not even in memory, here where children
dressed all

in debris peer out from under slabs of
jagged stones,

bombed homes, mountains or ruined
thrones

they may have climbed, small kings and
queens

of imagined realms, smoothest pebbles
in small palms their

caressed totems and favorite songs as they
would have climbed

here where now they half-buried lie, small bodies
crushed by pitched-black

weight, there they wait, to be pulled out from
under the remains

of broken town, mangled concrete, piled-up stones,
bones, dust clouds and

shrouds, on the children who are
scattered now

across the whole countryside