WAR | PALESTINE | POETRY
Born with a serial number
Five minutes after my hearing each airplane, the lives of several more Gazan families will be forever annulled.
2023–10–27
The sunny fall day enticed me to walk by the lake, to recuperate from my stay in Ramallah at the beginning of the war. Halfway along the path, I had to turn back. The sound of a tree being sawed was too painful to bear. So was the occasional roar of an airliner landing in the nearby airport. I had to constantly remind myself that they were not carrying bombs.
(Photo by the author, Oct. 27, 2023)
In Ramallah we braced for impact the morning of Oct. 7, and all afternoon, until we heard the airplanes overhead and then we knew.
As I say in the poem, “A rose among gods of stone”,
I know how many bombs they dropped on Gaza,
I counted the flights overhead.
We all knew, from footage of recent Gaza bombings (5/2021, 8/2022, and 5/2023) what Israeli bombs do. A whole apartment building — and what is there to bomb in Gaza but apartment buildings? — comes tumbling on the lives and families inside. The families don’t even know that their death sentence — for being born in Gaza — will be executed in the next five minutes. But I, and everyone in Ramallah, can hear the plane, and know what is going to happen.
Five minutes after my hearing each flight, the lives of several more Gazan families will be forever annulled. Worse, there is nothing, nothing that we, nor the people of Gaza, can do about it.
It is a genocide, and we’ve known it from Day 1. A formation of Israeli airplanes flew overhead every 10 minutes, for the first 72 hours straight, before they changed the flight path. At peak times of night they stepped it up to a sortie every 5 minutes. That’s how frequently buildings were collapsing in Gaza.
Born with a serial number,
To match the bomb that will take them away,
The children of Gaza,
Bred for bombs and falling buildings
Every airplane, every bomb,
marked for an apartment building,
Where frightened families wonder if their turn is up.
Turned up in the rubble:
Body parts of a teddy bear, and a broken butterfly hairpin -
Shreds of another life undone
The indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Gaza is a genocide.
It is no coincidence that a mass shooter is on the loose in America. After all, the president expressed unlimited support to Israel while it is in the midst of perpetrating a genocide. He addressed the people — the taxpayer — to help him throw unlimited weapons behind his chosen sides in each of two regional conflicts that are not America’s. While he plays chess with Gazan and Ukrainian lives, the weapons corporations enriched from those wars lobby to block any sensible gun safety legislation, dispensing their surplus war gear on America’s streets.
As I write in Fugitive Dreams:
Every conflict has people profiting from it. Perhaps the ones defying solution are simply too profitable to end. …
While Israel was attacking Gaza and Lebanon, the US accelerated shipments of “smart bombs” to replenish Israel’s arsenal. The business interests couldn’t care less whether the lives lost were Lebanese, Palestinian, or Israeli. They couldn’t care less if they were Iraqi or American. The sums are too great for them to worry about something as a trivial as human life.
It is clear that the powers that be care little for any lives, Palestinian, Israeli, or American. Humans are only fallen leaves to be blown by the dusty winds of commercial interests and real estate and military strategists.
The genocide in Gaza is ongoing — the bombing has not stopped. In fact, it has intensified in the last week, and last night.
Please speak out for Palestinian lives in Gaza.
With love from an undisclosed location,
– Ramsey Hanhan
