For Drew Steele

 

Two old men, one with a raggedy spray tan,

the other an industrial comb-over,

sat facing representatives of the world’s

media outlets, who appeared to believe

that public pronouncements by the one

with the orange face and the white hands

were to be understood literally.

 

Behind them a high-banked

coal fire appeared to blaze and crackle

in the hearth of a mantelpiece laden

with gilded objects. The older man

had – to ‘Stupéfaction Mondiale’,

as the headline in Libération put it –

just outlined his real estate plan

for one hundred and forty square miles of land

in the so-called Middle East, a plot

about the size of Las Vegas but with

a population two thirds the size.

 

The younger man smirked briefly. Few noticed

that, in the proposal for the final

solution to Gaza’s long history of

mayhem, the number of Gazans cited

was at least half a million fewer

than the estimate fifteen months before.

But, anyway, the whole lot would be cleansed.

 

Neither of the senior citizens

mentioned then, or subsequently, that beneath

the rubble-strewn and charnel house surface

of the Strip, and its contiguous seabed,

are extensive, untapped and unfracked

reserves of oil and gas.