I originally wrote this in December, shortly after Refaat Alareer was killed by the IDF, in the spirit of his poem If I must die but didn’t publish it at the time because I thought it didn’t do him justice.

But, now Netanyahu has repeated the line “We are in a battle of civilization against barbarism” in his deranged rant at the US Congress calling for more weapons to “finish the job faster”; so, time to fly the kite.

On the day this was written, Palestinian casualties stood at 18, 412. Today, it is more than twice that. What price “civilisation”?

Barbarism

In the battle of civilisation against barbarism

It is necessary for the civilised

To bomb the schools of the barbarians and kill their children

To bomb the homes of the barbarians and kill their families

To bomb the hospitals of the barbarians and kill their doctors and nurses

To stop the barbarians’ sources of fresh water, so they thirst

To stop the barbarians access to food, so they hunger

To cut off the barbarians’ access to medicines, so they sicken

To kill the barbarians teachers and poets to still their stories

To bulldoze the barbarians olive groves to empty their land

so you can say later that they were never on it

To flood the ground water with salt so nothing can grow

To bomb the barbarians libraries and archives to erase their history

in the futile hope that, this time, “the young will forget”

To drive the barbarians away from shelter

Make them move, again and again

To make sure that they despair

To strip barbarian prisoners to their underclothes and make them kneel in the dust

To kill a hundred or a thousand barbarians for every civilised casualty

So everyone knows that order is restored

Because every civilised mother knows

That their children can only sleep safely

When the barbarian children are all safely dead.

In a grave

Still digging…

12/12/23