Sharif Gemie
Sea, sand, sun
The noisy marketplace with
Onions, olives and oranges
The tight breeze-blocked street ends
In a blue Mediterranean illusion
Bricks, dust, heat
The most crowded place on earth
Three religions watch each other
Their calm evaporates in the intensity
A punch-up in a church, a stabbing in the dark
A protocol of lies, the romance of racism
Rifles in the cafes, bullets at the funerals, shrapnel in the playgrounds
Hating falsehoods laughing loudest
A nightmare where no-one awakes
Walls, sand, guards
A line on the ground
A division imposed
The air is imprisoned
The kites aren’t free
Green fields and brown earth
White roads and cracked tracks
Parallel but far, far apart
Green flags, blue stars
The complexity of ages, a binary
For or against
Sanctified by governments
Signed in blood
Imposed by soldiers
One October, an evil act of revenge
A single dark thread in a hate-worn tapestry
Dust, bricks, flames
The eye of the drone
Flies over the breezeblocks
AI crosslines a target
House or hospital
School or mosque
One click, they’re gone
Coffee, cookies, batteries
Phone calls with only one subject: stay or go?
The nightly paralysis of fear
Holding on to each other, waiting
As the light from the phone fades
Keep your passport for if you die
There is no haven
Only chaos, flight and starvation
The days have no names
But survival
Fire, blood, bombs
Exponential revenge
One death will be paid with ten
Ten with a thousand
The balance of history is skewed
The crimes of the past are paid by the living
The errors of the old imposed on the young
The demands of the powerful suffered by the powerless
Moon, dust, silence
The false hope of a reckoning
For the other is guilty, always
Trapped in this cycle
A new tragedy, each death
***
White screen, grey face
The eternal viewer pauses
Gaza?
The mouse clicks down an old path
The path of the Crusaders when they robbed and slaved
The path to the India of the Raj
The path to Suez
The ruins and deaths are fake!
Blame Soros, 5G, the brown-skinned migrants
Little Greta, the lefties, the tyrannical Muslims
Hate flows one way, money flows another
While a colony sends in its tanks.
Sharif is a retired history lecturer living in South Wales. From 1995 to 2009, he was editor of Anarchist Studies. His first novel, The Displaced, will be published in March 2024. https://www.asppublishing.co.uk/product-page/the-displaced-a-novel-by-sharif-gemie
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