The Guardian 1.9.25.
‘The deadly toll on journalists in the Gaza War.’
‘Over the past 22 months, the war in Gaza has become the most deadly conflict for journalists in history. Last week, five more Palestinian journalists . . . were killed in a double strike on Nasser hospital . . . bringing the total number of journalists and media workers killed in this conflict since October 2023 to at least 189, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Other groups put the tally far higher.’
The Guardian 7.9.25.
‘A total of 890 arrests were made at a demonstration in central London on Saturday against the banning of the protest group Palestine Action.’
what they did yesterday afternoon
by Warsan Shire
they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who use to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?
i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.
later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere
I Was in a Hurry
by Dunya Mikhail
translated by Elizabeth Winslow
Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn’t notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
Please, if anyone passes by
and stumbles across it,
perhaps in a suitcase
open to the sky,
or engraved on a rock
like a gaping wound,
or wrapped
in the blankets of emigrants,
or canceled
like a losing lottery ticket,
or helplessly forgotten
in Purgatory,
or rushing forward without a goal
like the questions of children,
or rising with the smoke of war,
or rolling in a helmet on the sand,
or stolen in Ali Baba’s jar,
or disguised in the uniform of a policeman
who stirred up the prisoners
and fled,
or squatting in the mind of a woman
who tries to smile,
or scattered like the dreams
of new immigrants in America.
If anyone stumbles across it,
return it to me, please.
Please return it, sir.
Please return it, madam.
It is my country…
I was in a hurry
when I lost it yesterday.
Fugitives
by Denise Levertov
The Red Cross vans, laden with tanks of
drinking water, can go no further:
the road has become a river.
The dry, dusty, potholed road
that was waiting the rainy season
is flowing with men and women
(especially women) and children.
Silent in stumbling haste,
almost all of them. Only the wailing
of young babies, hungry and terrified,
wafts over the lava-flow
that brims and hurries, dividing briefly
to pass the impediment that each van
is to them, impervious to their purpose
(the first one caught in the flood,
the remaining small convoy already attempting
to back, inch by inch, to where miles behind them,
they might turn).
From a plane,
the road — the river — would look
like one of those horrible nature films
about insects moving as one in some
instinctive ritual; horrible because
though one by one each creature might have
some appealing feature, en masse they are
inexorable, a repulsive teeming collective . . .
But these are people, and the Red Cross Driver,
one of the last to remain in what seems
an unhelpable land of terror, knows it,
sees it, feels it. He has not the distant
impersonal gaze of a pilot high overhead watching
an insect swarm. He deeply perceives
war has deprived these humans, his fellows,
of choice of action. Diminished them. And they advance,
dazed, haggard, unstoppable, driven
less by what shreds of hope may cling to their bodies
than by despair that might well have left them
paralysed in the dust, inert before an imminent slaughter,
but which some reflex, some ancient trigger in brain-tissue,
propels into grim motion thousand upon thousand,
westward to zones Relief has already fled from.
Because, today we have to be careful with our words by David Dayson Let's begin with words: words speak to words, they cannot touch, still less command, until a spoken word falls off the page into the real world, where another mind makes of it what they will; there’s no implicit truth in words, only what we agree to agree upon, enough for us to get along. Like a fool I expected words to rise up and stop the guns of tyrants; but no, it’s words that rise up and stop the voice of peaceful protest. If I were to march and shout for Peace, I would do it with my mouth taped shut, my placard would be empty white, for you to imagine words I may write . . . . . . Because, today we have to be careful with our words. Should I have sharpened a written sentence to a fine edge, will this one do instead: are we not of interest to each other, enough to share our bread and stop another’s slaughter? And my words melt into air, into thin air; but no, it’s the silence of the dead we share. Because, today we have to be careful with our words.
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I will copy out these for my friends