Photo courtesy of Literary Hub
Mosab, reading your post today of the dead
from an airstrike in Khan Younis, cousins,
uncles, aunts, six members of your extended
family, six degrees that separate us, I felt
at first I did not have words to console, but
now these have come. They are not grand
or clever but spring from the heart. Today
your friends and I, readers throughout
the world, we too have lost six members of
our family, and we will mourn for forty days,
mark every anniversary, lay flowers at our altars
where we live on the planet, which grieves as well
another chemical, self-induced abomination
on the patrimony we inherited and continue to destroy.