How can we mourn?

by Janet Sillett

how can we mourn a city
who are not its victims?
we do not hear the drones
or smell decay
we do not feel the shaking of foundations

our eulogy a distortion stretched threadbare
gaslighting humanity

“Don’t scroll past”

but I do now, often, nearly twelve months on
a child swaddled by his father in blood rags
a tiny girl dancing

seven, eight years old
I find a book with images of a death camp after liberation
stacked corpses blood gathering on the dirt floor
ungendered unnamed a child’s shoe crushed by bones

images
pinned in my head
my birthright

scars of memory
like those on my back
embedded

how can I mourn a city
when it is impossible to shut out the clamour of genocide

old men in the library
in shorts and white socks
dull sandals
waiting for their wives in print dresses

shop windows
colour refracted in glass
splintered

wisteria around the graveyard in its second bloom of summer
a shadow of its earlier birth

today silence may drown the cacophony

The breaking of bread

by Janet Sillett

Families queuing for round flat loaves
each morning before dawn
the struggle for bread

Sharq Bakery in Gaza City bombed late October 2023
in the doorway blood mixes with flour
the smell of baking lingering in the space that is left

I recall Jewish black bread, caraway studded
the scent of my grandmother’s house in Salford 1960
reconstruction in flour and yeast

Catastrophe

by Janet Sillett

Starved of light
an exodus in slow motion before the rains of a Gazan winter
the memory of dispossession in every stone

I picture the grey Polish landscape of my imagination
lines of people displaced moving
always moving

when people are unnamed
there is no need for bread

Author's Note

More than 70 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have been displaced since 8 October 2023

Up to 2 million Jews fled the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914

To those who seek nemesis in my name

by Janet Sillett

you do not do this in my name
you do not use my name
you do not speak for me

my anger is mine
not yours
you do not use my name
to light up the dying sky with sulphurous stars
to bleed the ocean
to bury the past in shards

you do not cancel air and water in my name

you do not use my name
to dispossess the words of poets

spit your lies into someone else’s mouth