We see you.
A poem for the uncounted Gazan souls
We see you. You danced the dabke You danced the Running Man You wrapped your grandmother’s hand-sown Keffiyeh around your shoulders You sold nard in your gift shop You read Anne of Green Gables You read The Fire Next Time You played with your children before bed You waited for an ambulance You drove the ambulance You slept You woke up You joked with your little sister about how she can’t dance You sang to your baby You nursed your baby You gave birth to your baby You were the baby abandoned to the animals that fed on you You tried to save your brother You tried to save your self You walked You met strangers who became family while you survived together You slept with eyes open You scrounged for food You baked sand patties You ate animal feed and grass You forced yourself to eat it You forced yourself to live You remembered the days when color lived in Gaza You flew a kite and marveled at the power of wind You held your look-alike daughter to your chest while rocking her under the sound of drones You told her lies It doesn’t matter that her insides are outside right now. “You will live,” you said. “Hold on.” You rejoiced when the first 30 day Ceasefire was declared in the Fall 2023. You bought bread and held hope tight against your chest You searched for electricity and internet connection and uploaded your reports to Al Jazeera You walked to the beach to collect food from the sky You swam to a salt-soaked box of manna You had no idea a box of canned food was falling over your head You struggled to wake up You preferred dreamland—where your father and brothers and mother and sisters and grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends and neighbors and the butcher and the bread maker and the homeless orphans and their dead parents—were all still alive and walking through the streets You scrolled through your Instagram feed and paused on Matthew Miller’s latest White House press conference You watched Miller tap dance between pointed questions You watched him spew words without meaning. You felt your heart sink—again. The next post down screamed the Al Jazeera headline: “Biden administration plans to send $1bn in military aid to Israel” And you imagined a world without empires that didn’t know you, but were hell-bent on dominating you. You imagined a world without enemies And you imagined a world without genocide And then you were all gone All 186,000 of you Gone No identifiable tattoos No face No skin Only skin—no bones Only bones under rotted flesh—unearthed from mass graves bulldozed bodies crushed and made one with the soil of your birth No access to your body; sandwiched between cement floors and ceilings No body at all All erased from the official count. We see you.
Inspired by The Lancet Report
President and founder of FreedomRoad.us, Lisa Sharon Harper is a writer, podcaster and public theologian. Lisa is author of critically acclaimed book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World—And How To Repair It All.
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