Persistence
The persistence of this gash, persnickety yet pernicious, painful, powerful, collective memory, to get the image framed for the memorial service, bodies burnt on the Yal Devi Express, houses and kovil…
Author: Indran Amirthanayagam
The Utility of Tears
These tears fall into buckets, run to streams and rivers. These tears, shed weight from the body, leave a light patina like drops on the windowpane. How to go on…
Spring
Where do these words come from? From the bleeding River Jordan. From the Gaza sea bobbing with bodies and food packages. From the mosque in Rafah in the gunsights of…
Praying for Rain
A school in Nuseirat. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir-al Balah. These are the most recent places in Gaza to be memorialized later on a wailing wall. Here fourteen civilian women…
Target
I don’t want to be a pessimist, to darken your day, to add a fresh pack of stones to the load you carry. But I cannot help myself, not now,…
On Burial and Punishment
I note the moral equivalence, one punishment for another although I don’t think we can fix history in a flash. Go back to days before October 7th or 8th. But…
Peacemaker in the War Room
The 2,000 bomb and its little sister, the 500 pounder, have had a highly successful field test in Northern and Central Gaza in recent months. Large scale apartment buildings and…
Get Out My Vote
How can you expect my vote when you allow Haitians arrived at our border to be picked up and deported back to the island from which they fled, where rape, murder,…
Hernia in Hell
The handbasket’s full. Really. There’s no room at the inn, my friend. Thirty five thousand souls blown off the Gaza Strip since October, 1500 from Port Au Prince since January.…
The Question Seller
Behind front doors of friends and compatriots in Port Au Prince, we listen to evening prayers and the silence of fear, and observe the strength of resistance against the bush’s rules,…
It’s A (Sur)real World
In North Gaza a food pallet is attached to a parachute that fails to open. Five people are crushed when it hurtles to earth. Besides burying the bodies, pallbearers open the…
Surviving In Wilderness
sprayed blood on flour sacks, on February 29. A Leap Day for a Leap Year, 2024. But 112 dead Palestinians are no longer leaping for flour. They are lying on the…
News Without Terror
The reporter gives us news and despite the agony in details: shrapnel killing kids, hospitals, schools and mosques bombed with two thousand pound projectiles, almost two million people displaced, hounded, on…
Elegy for the Extended Family
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…
Mourning Children, Tyrant
Nobody will mourn you, tyrant, when you’re gone, when the coffin lowers into the grave. Nobody will visit the memorial and there will need to be guards placed on each…