Letter to the Girl from Gaza
Dear daughter of sand and thread,
I write to you with letters of smoke and rust,
while your name—Gaza—frays
like a gauze that never manages
to bandage the world’s dark wound.
Before, they wove tatreez in your veins,
looms that sang beneath the sun of orange trees,
now only the broken spindle of the missiles remains,
the warp turned into a mute scar.
They have stolen your bread and dew,
turned water into a weapon,
thirst is a knife that carves
your throat and that of those you called brothers.
Hunger opens trenches in your hands,
while the world watches, hypnotized,
your genocide on plasma screens:
an entire people bleeding out live,
their voices—birds without wings—
trapped in algorithms of indifference.
Gaza is no longer a city, it is rubble that sings,
a broken verse where children play hide-and-seek
among scrap metal and shadows.
The sun still rises, impassive,
but even the light flees your streets,
and the birds—like your laughter—
nest in craters.
And you, girl with burned eyes,
caress the void your little girl left behind,
while death spits ashes and bullets at you.
Then, amid the smoke, you open your mouth
and from your throat a lullaby is born,
a croon woven with roots and tears,
to rock the small absence
that iron turned into dust and embers.
Your song is a blossomed dagger,
an insatiable seed beneath the slag,
a white-hot scream that pierces headlines and prayers.
You know the world will turn off its screens,
but your voice—like the ancient gauze—
will tangle in the memory of the wind,
and no one will be able to unravel your name.
With the sun that is not enough to cleanse the blood,
but persists, mute witness,
I sign this letter on your skin of sonorous sweetness
and I ask that void which burns:
When will the gods stop weaving shrouds?
At this point, God is dead or an atheist.
(For she who sings where others see only ruin)
