You can’t help the tears
after reading Brandy Nālani McDougall’s lament
for Refaat Alareer’s death from a bomb blast in Gaza,
another poet silenced.
So many deaths you
can hardly keep up with the names, dates, detritus.
So much wretched death to swallow,
it cankers your stomach,
bleaches your melanin.
So many times they have sold, branded, demolished
the land they did not create,
the people in their way.
So many lands,
so many peoples,
you can hardly keep up.
If you are yet living…
From the window, you search,
count antelope, deer, birds, sheep,
trees wrestling without wind, guilt
still on their leaves.
Jill Scott sings “Golden” from your speaker,
as today the sun shines on this land,
this land sold, named, branded.
How many times?
This land stripped.
How many people
After bomb blasts hemispheres away,
horrific silence sharpens the moans of haints,
mingles with trickles of
blood that never dries.
on this land?
Somewhere a father has used up
all his tears, a mother wails rocking
the remains of their child
in her charred arms,
battered breasts dangling
from her heavy chest.
And you?
You chronicle elegies.
Are you yet living?
Blessings in one hand,
bruise and blood
in the other, you
gather tears of sun
to ferment poems
Tamara J. Madison
Tamara J. Madison is a writer, poet, and editor with work published and produced on various platforms. She has presented on the TEDx platform and is an MFA graduate of New England College and Anaphora Arts Fellow. Her recent poetry collection is Threed, This Road Not Damascus (Trio House Press).
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