Poem: Gaza Betrayed

Gaza Betrayed

Dedicated to the victims of the Gaza genocide: July-August 2014

Rising into the blackened haze
Smoke and stench of children ablaze
All hope, laughter, dreams
Obliterated by blitz and siege

Who will make Gaza’s children wake?
Who will heal their mothers’ searing pain?
Who will end the agony, still the fear?
Who will dam the rivers of blood and tears?

Not the Muslims busy with rituals and rites
Alternatively fasting by day, feasting by night
Not Ramadhan’s seekers of spirituality
Undistracted by blood and ugly realities

Not the Muslim leaders promoting insularity
Focus on yourselves, your children, your locality!
Whilst Gaza burns and weeps alone
Strangulated, incinerated, ignored

No outcry from the pulpit, not even a whisper
No call for action, protest, even prayer!
Gaza’s bloodbath, Syria’s slaughter, Iraq’s destruction
Provokes only silence in the Friday sermon

Where, pray tell, is even one community that truly cares
To rise, strategise, rather than look the other way?
Where are the leaders to inspire and guide
A vision beyond cultural and geographic divides?

With modernity, ignorance has long ceased
Death and destruction fill our screens
Yet if ignorance is weakness, uglier still
Is passivity, inertia, a lack of collective will

We allowed Gaza to burn and bleed and grieve
Reek of rotting flesh, sewage and gangrene
Through 70 years of occupation and crippling siege…
Shame on the Ummah, Shame on our apathy!

Written by Sis Fatema Valji