Sculpture by Juana de Neme.
You are one of the most powerful
Armies in the Middle East.
Your valor unquestioned…
Your training superb
Your country the most technologically
Advanced in the region
Your people exquisitely
Cultured.
The question
Is how you use that power, that knowledge.
Barbaric acts from one side don’t justify
The same from the other.
I say this as the winds of destruction and death
Blow over Gaza.
That is why I ask you, soldier, to remember
That the bombs you drop
On houses, schools, mosques, even on
Precarious refugee camps
Will leave children without parents
Families without children
Dead and mutilated bodies beyond recognition.
And that while you boast (with reason) of your capacity
To hit with exquisite accuracy a body inside a car
You destroy instead whole neighborhoods and towns
With children, women, the elderly and the sick
Trapped inside
In your show of perverse manhood.
Calling yourself “the most moral
army in the world”
You don’t hesitate to use starvation as a weapon of war
Nor the most ferocious means
To destroy a country
To smithereens and
To displace and kill those surviving
In your endless desire for
Conquest and revenge.
