Portside

They came out of a nightmare 
no one admits to dreaming.  
No one even admits to sleeping.  

They stormed inland, acknowledged no innocence,
gang-raped women,  murdered families,
burned a father and his son alive, killing and killing.
They took hostages and disappeared.

The world saw, 
and offered its battered heart. 

For a moment, there was silence.    
    
Then, We will wipe them from the face of the earth

The trapped people of Gaza, without water or escape,
run and mourn and bleed and starve,
helpless under the bombs.

The diggers of mass graves outside the last hospital do their work.
Doctors perform operations without anesthetic, 
wounded children with their shocked eyes stare inward.
Thousands dead, so many.

Somewhere underground the hostages are hidden in tunnels 
while the city dies.  It is in the way.
It's as if an army of mad surgeons terrorized it, 
methodically cutting into people in their search for a cancer.  
What will be left in the end but disease?

    We believed the situation was contained. 
    It was like a stew at the back of the stove.  
    Turn it down if it gets too hot, don't let it get too cold.

    We ate it with our daily bread.
    Some had too much, some didn't get enough.
    Isn't that the world?

The world is upside down.
The dead lie unburied above the ground,
the living beneath, hidden in tunnels.  
The victim is oppressor, the strong, feeble. 
The weak can hope only for merciful death.

Beneath this yellow land is the mixed dust
of prophets, holy men, workers and kings, 
conquerors, settlers, nomads.  All food now 
for creatures who live without light.

A huge thick worm, shaken to the surface,
has found the stew, gorged on it, and grown sick.  
The black spew of its vomit is spreading.  

What can stop it?  
A pail, a sponge, a rag, a doctor, a medicine, God?

Someone with a different dream than this 
nightmare of darkness in which no one sleeps?

Charlotte Muse has published six collections of poetry, most recently In Which I Forgive the River. She also edited the anthology in extremis, At the Corner of Hope and Despair. She has taught poetry at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley Extension, the Lifelines Project for cancer patients and their caregivers, and at many other venues. She teaches and writes in Menlo Park, CA.