Have You Seen Gaza?

O painter,
have you seen Gaza?
Wipe the colors from your canvas—
no pigment captures this pain.
Your old strokes have no meaning here.
This suffering demands new lines.

O poet,
have you heard Gaza’s cry?
Let your pen tremble with truth,
for rhymes mean nothing
when verses drown in blood.

You speak of resistance?
Of hunger, of dignity,
of honor, faith, justice?
Then go—
Go to Gaza, barefoot and bare-souled,
and witness what words can no longer hold.

The tyrant—
has he ever seen a mirror this honest?
History has written many horrors,
but never dared to etch this one.
What is unfolding now
has no precedent, no mercy.

And you dare speak of human rights?
Of freedom, of compassion?
All those polished words
have shattered like glass
on Gaza’s bleeding streets.

O pen,
rise again—not to write,
but to testify.
O language,
be reborn—not in beauty,
but in justice.

Let the letters fall like stones.
May sentences collapse under their own weight.
May songs fall silent,
poems crack open,
and novels turn to ash.

Because they are incomplete—
All of them.
False. Hollow.
Empty of truth and trembling with comfort.

Looking for meaning?
Look to Gaza.
There you will see it all:
The oppressor and the oppressed,
courage and fear,
eternity and extinction,
justice and betrayal—
all walking the same torn streets.

A child’s name—
added to the death toll.
And the world?
It watches like it’s reading numbers.

But ask yourself:
Isn’t it just a single life?
Yes, just one breath,
but sometimes
a breath weighs more than nations.

To die in your bed is no achievement.
But to fall for a just cause,
to gift your life to truth—
that is immortality.

In Gaza,
to die
is not to vanish.
It is to become
a verse that cannot be erased.