I must come to hate what I love, in the same moment, at the instant of granting death. I must…offer them the gift of death… (The Gift of Death, Derrida)
Sahr, [2] they thought, is a costly name
in a dawn of desert dune,
and still they film the magmatic frame
where the apothecary was hewn.
I am enamoured of how they strip—
Gaza from the news channel
from google and its varsities, rip—
like a newly woven flannel,
partly from a childhood ishtehaar, [3]
where a girl wore her bigger size—
the stripping was not shown on air
lest a brand-name capsize.
I know how it feels to have smelled
moisture in promise of the monsoonal slain,
but how to mark the skull you welled
while you were just mapping terrain?
Across Mediterranean’s ploy,
where noon milks your piscean guards,
where evening has brought a third world toy
of Sahr’s leftover shards…
There was no razaa, no article
of faith, of wraith, of Aybaki
of the scarred Welayat-o-Mahkama, [4]
till Gaza powdered, too charred to flee.
I am so tempted to make olives of their lives
and transport it as oil or verse
to Sicily; it shall be tourism
or even a film, a picturesque hearse.
This is my razaa go articulate
The exact postures of their flight:
the arsenals that killed your dawn, your child—
let the dead be writhing, until I write.
