Jesus Never Visited Gaza
Rebecca Ruth Gould
We stood, reciting the names of the dead.
A non-Jewish Jew,
I violated the community’s norms.
Forgive me.
I needed to share my grief with someone
& to unburden myself with a siren
song.
The list of the dead dragged across many pages:
families grouped together, seeking shelter in each other’s
arms, just as they had done when the bombs
pummelled their houses into shards.
Everyone was embarrassed.
Pronunciations were odd.
Arabic articles mixed with Hebrew and British dictions.
I asked myself why we mourn
and for whom we mourn
when the dead are gone.
The God I don’t believe
—the God I disagree with—
whispered in my ear:
we mourn our complicity,
we mourn to wipe the stains from our hands--
of our creature comforts, our taxes,
our warm and cozy homes--
our guilt, soaked in blood.
The more we wash, the wider our wounds--
their wounds—fester in the sun
of war’s delirium.
Politics repeats itself
like American drones in lands they don’t belong.
Jesus said that the dead should bury the dead.
He never visited Gaza.
A non-Jewish Jew,
I violated the community’s norms.
Forgive me.
I needed to share my grief with someone
& to unburden myself with a siren
song.
The list of the dead dragged across many pages:
families grouped together, seeking shelter in each other’s
arms, just as they had done when the bombs
pummelled their houses into shards.
Everyone was embarrassed.
Pronunciations were odd.
Arabic articles mixed with Hebrew and British dictions.
I asked myself why we mourn
and for whom we mourn
when the dead are gone.
The God I don’t believe
—the God I disagree with—
whispered in my ear:
we mourn our complicity,
we mourn to wipe the stains from our hands--
of our creature comforts, our taxes,
our warm and cozy homes--
our guilt, soaked in blood.
The more we wash, the wider our wounds--
their wounds—fester in the sun
of war’s delirium.
Politics repeats itself
like American drones in lands they don’t belong.
Jesus said that the dead should bury the dead.
He never visited Gaza.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of, most recently, the poetry collection Beautiful English (2021) and the nonfictional work The Persian Prison Poem (2021). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded the Creative Writing New Zealand Flash Fiction prize in 2019.
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