Latched onto my mother’s chafed nipple, I tasted her grief,
smelled her nightmares. Owl-eyed child, I saw her ghosts,
wept with her for nameless Jews in Vilnius, in Kyiv—
marched into the forest at gunpoint, forced to dig pits
wide enough, deep enough to swallow all their corpses.
I heard the shots, felt the mud-clods and rocks shoveled over them.
Surely the survivors would always recognize genocide’s face.
Eight decades later, from half a world away,
on video I watch their grandchildren—my kinsfolk—
pump fists as they bulldoze centuries-old West Bank villages
—pulverize Gaza’s apartment blocks,
target hospitals, universities, primary schools.
Who will raise a generation of children
whose siblings and parents lie uncounted beneath rubble?
Who will console parents whose children bleed out
on cold floors in broken wards—not enough beds,
blankets, blood supply, morphine, antibiotics?
Who will shelter frail elders who have no place to go,
soothe wailing infants who have nothing to eat? Who will hold
a mirror to the faces of the butchers in charge? I am afraid
to ask my grandsons if they believe peace can be bought
with bloodshed with bullets with bombs
