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


  • AND THE STARS

    One of the few survivors of the attack

    on a Gaza City refuge – that had once

    been a school – is a five-year-old girl,

    who walks alone through the burning building.

    Her name is Waad. Most of her family

    have perished, including her mother.

    Traumatised she speaks softly: ‘I love Mama

    as big as the sky and the earth – and the stars.’

    She is surrounded by concrete rubble,

    domestic detritus, and the unfound dead.

     

    An hour or so’s drive away, a horde of

    well-fed men is striding through the narrow streets

    of old Jerusalem chanting ‘Death

    to the Arabs!’ Though the Arabic

    and Hebrew for ‘death’ and ‘love’ have the same

    Semitic roots, the child and the chanting mob

    seem galaxies apart.

     

     


    One response to “AND THE STARS”


    1. Ian Craine Avatar
      Ian Craine

      A fine quintet of poems, David. Shorter than most but telling reminders of history’s processes and consequences, of men thoughtless and devious, of tribes as victim and aggressor. And of choices made. Be selfish. Or, be just.

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