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David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
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ONE WEEK IN JUNE: FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
News agency photographs are frequently,
by chance, unacknowledged legislators.
In the first – singly or in family groups,
some on foot, others in donkey carts –
displaced people are travelling north
along the shoreline. To their right, our left,
is a bombed-out multi-storey apartment block.
Beyond, seawards, are what might be tents.
In the far distance are the tall white chimneys
of the coal-fired power station in Ashkelon.
In the second photograph five children
are playing on the beach building sand castles –
two young boys, two young girls, and an older girl.
Behind them, perhaps fifty yards away,
is the Al-Baqa Internet Café.
The third is taken from the Israeli side
of the border fence – two rows of razor wire.
Beyond them are hectares of building rubble.
In the foreground of the fourth, two young men
are carrying humanitarian aid –
one in a wheelbarrow, the other
in his arms – from a UN centre
in Bureij refugee camp, which was
established in 1949.
Since the photographs were taken – not quite
two months ago – a 500 lb bomb
has been dropped on the cybercafé,
and ninety two children have been starved to death.
One response to “ONE WEEK IN JUNE: FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS”
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My dad has photographs of his time in WW2 – sand in Africa and sand in Normandy… as fraction-of-a-second moments set between millions of such moments… many of places (North Africa) when he had no idea where they were, no idea where they had come from, and no idea where they were being sent next. The others (Normandy) were of moments of days of sheer and continual terror, landing tanks on beaches while being bombed and strafed; two of them sank in deep water and he had to swim out through the turret when the interior, completely in darkness, had filled with water. I took him back there several years ago, and what he couldn’t get over (or ‘get his head around’ in current language) was that those same beaches were now filled with playing and happy families. There were still traces of the floating roadway they had used (not all had remained afloat!) on the beach, now curiosities and serving as diving platforms.
In the museum in Bayeux, we were walking along walls of photographs, he pointing out the landmarks he remembered from 1945 – pulverised buildings, wrecked bridges, destroyed lives, anxious faces. Coming the other way was an elderly German man doing the same with HIS family. They met, looked at each other, smiled, shook hands, then embraced, then shrugged, and then carried on their separate ways, pointing out the same events in their two languages, but no longer ‘enemies’… and could have even become friends, I thought at the time.
One hopes that the same will come out of Gaza… Probably not in our lifetimes, but your poem will still exist in our children’s later lifetimes when that other pulverised dust and concrete will also have settled into a life there now unimaginable by today’s survivors.
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