Poem: Let Them Eat Leaves
Late at night, wrapped in the keffiyeh
loomed and sent to me from Hebron,
I try to imagine how it feels to starve to death.
Not like how I often say to myself
when I’ve skipped a meal,
“I’m starving,”
but really. Starving.
The body forced to eat itself
from inside.
A child wastes away
from eating boiled weeds,
donkey feed ground up to make
a kind of imitation bread.
When the people rushed a truck
of real flour, the IDF gunned them down,
a spray of bullets and blood
soaked the sacks.
What if I had no water
to drink, to cook with, to wash,
to flush a toilet even if
there were more than one latrine
for hundreds of displaced.
No need to drop food from the sky
along with bombs, a pallet of
cans—expired goods—can kill as well.
Am I a person who can imagine
the suffering of others, and not grow sick
or helpless; am I a person
who can have compassion
without fury too?
©2024 Jennie Orvino
The title of this poem comes from a story I read/saw about a Palestinian boy proudly gathering leaves for his family to eat. An adult relative tells him, “No habibi (“my dear”), we cannot eat those.” The crush of disappointment on child’s face…
NOTES:
Thursday.29. February at 5 AM, the Israeli occupation forces committed a massacre and a genocide against the Palestinians who were waiting for the aid trucks on Al-Rasheed street west of #Gaza city, thousands of Palestinians gathered there to receive the aid as they are suffering of hunger due to the Israeli siege.The Israeli tanks opened it automatic gunfire and killed 109 Palestinians so far and hundreds got wounded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I3xeFNdpLs
This is from a Breaking Points documentary report debunking Israel’s claims that these deaths were caused by a “stampede” of the Palestinians.. No wonder Israel will not allow outside journalists in Gaza. Google “Flour Massacre” for more. Breaking points.com with Krystal and Saagar is a new (to me) independent news outlet I discovered while searching Google Images about the Flour Massacre. I liked how they pulled from many U.S. mainstream sources (New York Times, etc. ) and also international sources like BBC and AlJazeera.
We who are aware are witness to an ongoing genocide of extraordinary cruelty. Despite the outcry and protests of the masses, our leaders are impervious to calls for a ceasefire now.
Somehow, I missed this a few months ago ago… and the atrocities, the massacres have continued. May we each find how to witness and then act, in daily ways, however small, to make more than a dent in our war machine. For me, the fury has been fuel. I don’t know how to witness these events without feeling outrage. And to weep.
Jennie. Yes. We must truly spend TIME trying to imagine it, you are asking what we need to ask, thank you thank you for being brave enough to imagine and ask such terrible things.