This is a poem that I wrote regarding the violence in Gaza. I feel helpless to do anything meaningful from so far away, yet am horrified by the footage I am seeing from the ground. One of my professors in college always said that, “under anger, there is always sadness.” I find myself very angry as I see new stories every day about children dying in refugee camps and underneath that anger is heart break that we—humanity—have allowed the world to become this way. I think of the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. The ER doctors and first responders on the ground in Gaza City are certainly children of God. The children who pray from hospital beds for their parents who have already died are children of God. May we do whatever is in our power, from near or far, to be peacemakers. May we also be children of God.
Another Way
Meagan Ruby Wagner
Right now
There are children in Gaza writing their names on their arms
In shaky print with permanent markers
In the hope that if their bodies are unidentifiable
At least one of their arms will make it and
And their families will have a piece of them to bury
And it does not have to be this way
There are dead mothers and dead children
Piled in sheet-shrouded rows
On the refugee camp roads
While sons and brothers and fathers
Wail and weep and gnash their teeth
And it does not have to be this way
There is blood in the ground
Blood in the rubble
Blood on the streets
Blood everywhere but in the bodies
Where it belongs
And it does not have to be this way
There are generation upon generation
Of sons and daughters who
Grow to be grandfathers and grandmothers
If they are the lucky ones
Who have never known peace for a day in their lives
And it does not have to be this way
Retribution after retribution after retribution
Revenge on revenge on revenge on revenge
Death that leads to death and graves that beget graves
And it will never end
Until someone decides
That it does not have to be this way