If you would sing

of God’s law or God’s love,

God’s covenant, God’s land,

call it required

reading for this rancid century:

Hind Rajab, five years old, 

in a small black Kia leaving Gaza City,

speaking with first responders,

whom her cousin called when the Israeli tank 

first tried to strike their car – her cousin screamed, 

& minutes later Hind said on the phone:

the tank is coming, please, 

the others in the car are dead,

the tank is coming & I’m scared,

please come, I am so scared,

please, when will you come?

The medic on the call said, 

Hind, why have you stopped talking?

She said, each time I speak,

blood spills out from my mouth

& stains my clothes.

I don’t want more laundry

for my mother to have to do,

when I see her again.

12 days later Hind’s body

found beside the bodies of her aunt, uncle

four cousins in the car

that had been shot 335 times.

In 6 seconds, Layan, 

15 years old, Hind’s cousin,

shot 64 times. Their bodies found

beside the ruined ambulance

in which were found

the bodies of the missing

paramedics. Night is here, is falling, 

& will never stop, night 

deepens & will never cease,

not absence of the sun,

night is a presence, empty 

& malignant, like the emptiness 

of bullet holes filling

the body of a five year old girl.

Leviticus: Ye shall not cut

your flesh for the dead,

for I am the Lord.

A chapter that begins:

Ye shall be holy, for I,

the Lord your God,

am holy. & when ye shall offer

a peace offering unto the Lord

offer it freely.

What good now is a poem,

or a prayer, or any offering in words?

Language is flecks of spittle 

falling from the slack 

mouth of our living God. 

Slack in senility or disbelief

or dread, a livid dread,

or something else,

I cannot say. Before Esau

& several hundred men

approached, Jacob was greatly

frightened & distressed.

The commentators ask,

why this redundancy?

Rashi’s answer: Jacob was frightened

that he might be killed,

& was distressed

that he might need to kill.

Consider Esau’s sadness. 

Esau cried out with a great & bitter cry,

& said unto his father,

bless me, even me, also, father.

please. Years later, Esau

begging for his brother to rejoin him,

brother he will never see again.

But who is Esau here, today,

& who is Jacob? Blessing

stolen & blessing withheld,

both warp the human soul

unmendably, until 

the blessing is returned –

to whom? Surrender to your desert

God carved out of wind,

God like the emptiness between these lines.

God like no ambulance. Give every blessing back

& then, armed with the nothing

you have always been

afraid you are, armed suddenly

with nothing else,

crawl through the wilderness

& find there, finally,

an altar for the offering

you swore millennia ago

to make. Offer yourself

when you have nothing left.

In seaside Gaza, in the mythic

history of who we are,

blind Samson, bleeding,

oozing blood and pus from where his eyes

had been, chained by the Philistines,

in prison, hears 

the breakers on the shore.

Says, let me lean, please,

on the pillars of your temple.

Prays, let me die, please

with the Philistines.

Let me find vengeance for my eyes.

Shatters the pillars & demolishes

the temple over him & his captors as one.

& now, in seaside Gaza,

in the mythless wreck of who

we have become,

the temple’s rubble

covers captor & captive,

the lust for an avenging

sacrifice metastasizes,

blood calls up from the earth,

that will not swallow it, to God,

who will not speak,

but would, if God had any body,

be discovered as a stain

beside that Kia hatchback,

charred, riddled with bullets,

smeared with gore, somehow

alive as God will always be alive,

past life, impossibly & silently,

God’s mutilated lips moving

like a flag of surrender,

tattered & flapping in a violent wind

that has no voice.

& there never has been a temple

that is not flattened by the victims

of its devotees. All worship

is idolatry, if it would give

a name to God that cannot hold

the names, unfurled,

of every child on this planet.

But the honest abecedarian

claims no comprehensiveness.

Nevertheless, consider –

Habiba Ashraf Mahmoud Abu-Assi,

Kfir Bibas,

Mila Cohen,

Sama Mohammed Yousef Darwish,

Fatima Ahmed Mahmoud Eid,

Amer Ahmed Amer Farajallah,

Youssef Taysir Fayez Al-Ghaliz,

Wateen Rami Raed Hamada,

Elias Mohammed Emad Iyyad,

Habiba Firas Mustafa Al-Jadi,

Kinan Akram Sameeh Karim,

Lana Yousef Emad Lolo,

Sahar Mohamed Raed Musleh,

Ahmed Mohammed Amin Nofal,

Qais Mohammed Ramadan Obeid,

Jibril Nader Nidal Qarmout,

Aysel Ibrahim Kamel Rashwan,

Mohammed Hassan Farid Salah,

Baker Ahmed Hassan Tafesh,

Fatima Mohammed Rizk Al-Wawi,

Celine Abd Al-Hadi Adel Zahir.

Each one of these a child killed

before their first birthday.

Each name a poem endless

as the light of any star,

the names together flooding past

the margins of this page,

blinding anew blind Samson

with their disembodied light,

like the glow of a long-dead star

magnified, as it reaches earth,

past any luster human sight

can bear, although the source 

has been extinguished 

from the cosmos since before

language began. If there were any justice,

this would be the power of a child’s 

death. Bright enough to blind God.

& nothing I have ever been

can save me from, at best,

complicity in this, I who deserve 

no temple more than Hind

could have deserved, no more language

& no more life. How can the human

body be God’s image when

the human body is this terrible machine?

I paid for Hind to die.

The awful sentence I have tried not to admit.

Taxes, abstracted by bureaucracy,

but clarity demands:

money I earned purchased

the weapons that attacked the car

in which she tried to flee.

I am not other than the murderer

I blame. Now somehow

we are unaware

that we ourselves are dying

in the rubble of the temple we 

ourselves have razed.

Theology is not what I believed

theology could be. 

Jacob said to Esau: I have seen thy face,

as though I saw the face of God.

& I have seen thy face

online, child, wounded by flame,

disfigured past recognition,

& looked there for my own face,

for the face of God we share,

& saw a flayed God 

pulsing unprotected blood

like ink, & ink like blood, 

into the channels that maintain the world. 

The guilt is universal, so must be also

the grief, & self-excoriating love.

It is incumbent on each person, 

in each generation,

to imagine that they are 

imprisoned in Gaza, & the parent of a child

murdered in Gaza,

& burned in a bombed hospital in Gaza, 

& starving to death in Gaza,

& the parent of a child

starving to death in Gaza.

& a child starving to death.

A child bleeding out, shot in the thigh by a sniper.

A child clinging to life, & a child

who cannot cling to life.

It is also incumbent

on each person to imagine

they are the sniper, 

and the bureaucrat

or general withholding food,

the pilot raining fire on the hospital,

the gunman in the tunnel,

shooting the emaciated

captive in the head. 

What have you done, 

my love, my precious one, 

in whom I had such hope, 

God says to you

each morning when you wake,

& each night when you go to sleep.

Your task – part of your task – 

is now to say the same thing

to yourself, each time you pass a mirror.

1939, after the Germans killed his son,

the Piaseczner rebbe, in a sermon,

said that Sarah died after the almost-sacrifice

of Isaac willfully, to protest

God’s and Abraham’s collusion

in her child’s death. She would not stay alive

in a world where children

are bound and offered on altars

to anything. And two years later,

the Piaseczner told his followers

that Nazi evil was the symptom of cosmic

imbalance, that divine severity

outweighed the divine compassion

that maintains the world,

beneath appearances,

and so it was their obligation – 

in the ghetto, in the valley of death’s shadow,

in the darkness that has not

stopped falling since God first

chose Abel as his favorite,

since God first commanded 

floodwaters to wipe out life – 

to embody God’s absent love,

to become compassion’s vessel

and thereby to bring back balance

in a cruel cosmos 

God could or would not, 

without help, restore.

Human hands dwell in heavenly heights,

the Zohar says. & heavenly hands

dwell in the lowest places,

shit stained, blood stained, in the microcosms 

woven by despair.

Death of a child is the death of God.

Hind wanted to grow up to be a dentist.

In the other world that I do not believe exists,

will there be anything to clean or heal?

Here in the only world,

bodies are found and are not found,

bodies are changed by what they do

& what is done to them,

the souls inside the bodies change,

deform. Who is there now

to beg forgiveness from.

& you are reading this, now,

in a world you have destroyed.

God, I am talking to you.

Human creature, to you.

Danny, human in the kitchen,

typing at the counter, drinking tea,

I am talking to myself.

My own son is asleep upstairs. 

God’s covenant is like a charred

& shattered ambulance. 

My prayer is like a severed wing.

Nothing is possible. Nevertheless,

please, let the children eat, & be restored.