Free Palestine

when they bombed the first hospital,

i knew they were ruthless: family members

sleeping, newborns crying as oxygen

stuttered off, icu beds sinking in a cascade

of rubble. a second, a loss, a life.

everything swirls in grief. dishwater

down the drain, me standing here

on nipmuc land, dry rag haloing my shoulders,

warm water over my palms, alive.

a congressman says he doesn’t know

how many children have to die for it to stop. i write

down children’s names on post-it notes, light

candles and say the mourner’s kaddish, paper

them over the windows of my senator’s office while

screaming. the senator stays silent.

75 years ago, nakba, families fleeing the same way,

killed, or carrying what belongings

they could bear. there is the word home

and then there is a story:

a jewish woman arrives in a new land

after being hunted for years. she lives

for a while in a tent. the rulers bring her

to a beautiful house, dishes dashed

across the table, dregs

of a meal from the inhabitants

who were hunted and fled. she says:

“take me back to the tent. i will never do

to anyone else what was done to me”.

it is not about faith but power.

decades of swirling grief.

a sign at a protest: biden’s head

haloed by a tossed shoe. in baghdad,

they too know the monster, throw

footwear like rocks in a fist clenched by

history.

jews sit in at ship yards and offices

because they too know

the story. we read about camps

in hebrew school, gas showers,

pogroms my grandmother fled.

we spread around the world

like broken glass, hoping to make

something glittering. more beautiful

as pieces than bunched armies

of an ethnostate.

every spark extinguished

could have burned. parents write names

on their children’s arms so if bombed

and lost they will still be counted. a sign

at a protest: “If i wrote all their names

on my body i would be ink”.

we should all be ink. a vast swath of color.

disappear in it and then ignite

the fires still to flame.

indigenous tribes set land ablaze

to make way for a new season.

the powerful instead steal the language

of the people who tried to extinguish us.

my ancestors bear ash

and anger in their throats,

carry the cold fear

of the morning

when they came for them.

how can we still let them

come? more beautiful

as rebellion than as silenced hauntings.

when i say “from the river to the sea” i mean

multiplicity, a muslim man with kind eyes who

stops me at the protest: “this is how it’s

supposed to be, we live

together in peace”.

one day i will meet you in an olive grove.

we will eat bread and drink the juice of

pomegranates. butterflies

surround us like petals. all aching and lost

souls will be there. we will hold each other

until the stars blaze through

that vast swath of dark.

Zoey Rose is a writer living in NYC on Lenape land. She loves a good walk, a good dance party, talking about feelings, harm reduction, and her two cats.