THIS IS WHAT 'LUCK' LOOKS TO CHILDREN OF GAZA DURING A GENOCIDE

This is what 'luck'

looks to children of Gaza

during a genocide:

A bullet fired by an Israeli

quadcopter lodged

between the skull and scalp

of a little girl,

one little girl like so many

whose heads were pierced

by Israeli bullets,

breaking their skulls,

making a bloody mess

of what were to be long lives,

ending all childish thoughts

with a bullet like this one.

This is what 'luck'

looks to children of Gaza

during a genocide.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

DAUGHTER OF SUAD SHATTA

Did they have time

to name you,

daughter of Suad Shatta,

born from the womb

of your dead mother

after Israel

bombed your family home

and killed her,

born for a life

that was counted in hours

until you died,

until you died too,

daughter of Suad Shatta.

Did they have time

to name you,

was anyone left

to name you,

or to remember

the name

your mother had chosen

for you, daughter

of Suad Shatta?

In midst of genocide

lives counted in hours

can go unnamed

as they go unnoticed

to so many

in this blighted world

we made for you,

daughter of Suad Shatta.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

THOUSANDS OF YEARS, EVEN

Awakening thinking

horny thoughts

about her, now in visions

giving in words

what he should give

her in flesh

yet words last longer

than a mere man could,

thousands of years, even.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

THE ONE HUNDRED

Israel is killing a hundred people per day

in Gaza, on average.

Bring into your mind the faces of a hundred people

you know, have known, during your life.

Family, friends, neighbours, school friends, fellow

students, people you have worked with.

Some claim a human being actually has trouble

to remember the faces of a hundred other humans.

That ours are still minds of hunter-gatherers,

small family groups coming together few times a year.

All the people you would ever knew back then

half a hundred or little more.

Try it nonetheless, child of long gone hunter-gatherers

living in a new and more brutal world,

and then think of them, the one hundred,

killed in Gaza, each day, for soon seven hundred days.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

SUMMER RAIN

The wind's steady hum rises

to a roar, tree

branches sway

in its grasp

beyond the creaking window

left open to the summer day

darkening fast under clouds

now hiding the Sun,

and then raindrops starts falling,

beating hard,

five minutes of hard rain

and then it peters out,

and the clouds part,

the Sun starts to shine,

restoring the landscape

that was,

but the wind goes

quiet, the roar fades

to a silence

and we are in a different afternoon.

28.-31.07.2025

WHEN EDUCATED PEOPLE CAN'T HANDLE A STREET PROTEST AGAINST AN ONGOING GENOCIDE

I'm listening to videos about

the genocide in Gaza,

the bride whose groom was killed

trying to get food the day

before their wedding,

the activist whose boat

was hijacked by Israel,

while trying to write

and translate, then take a break

from the extermination of human beings,

turn to a video about astronomy news,

the third instellar object flying

through the solar system among others,

but one of the hosts claims

to have been 'intimidated'

by having to come across a demonstration

against the genocide in Gaza.

And people still wonder

why the Holocaust was allowed to happen

when educated people, experts

of the most violent events in nature,

novas, supernovas, kilonovas and hypernovas,

can't handle a street protest

against an ongoing genocide.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

THEY ARE ASKING PEOPLE TO IDENTIFY HIM FROM HIS CLOTHES

This dead young man

from Gaza is faceless.

Not lost among the other dead,

a blurred face, identity erased

among the multitude of the dead.

No, he lies on a stretcher an individual,

young man made gaunt by hunger,

his body untouched

except Israel has erased his face

with its violence,

made it a mess of human flesh.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

HER SMILE ALONE

Her smile alone

makes one think

carnal thoughts,

flipping through

a mental Kama Sutra.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

HER BLACK MESH DRESS

Her black mesh dress

is just waiting

to be taken off;

how often has he said

"Oh, I don't think

you will be needing this,"

and how eagerly

have his hands

performed that task

in his visions.

31.07.2025

GAZING AT HER IMAGE

Only one problem

in the black mesh dress

his muse wears:

He can't feel its fabric

in his hands, her

skin underneath.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

A VISION GONE AWRY

He goes through her gifts,

brings up a vision

in which the panties in his hands

were just pulled off by him,

and she lies there, waiting,

thinking what's got on to him

and why he just sits there,

her panties in his hands

when he should put them aside

and start concentrating

on what awaits

laying before him on the bed.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

ON THE BEACH

We wouldn't need a blanket here,

the sand is soft and warm

on the beach,

it would wash off your skin

in the warm waters lapping dark

after we would have

merged like the waves reaching

the shore.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

NO RELIEF

So hard to sit here and write

what fills the mind,

dear muse, 

even when the wind from the window

has a slight cool edge

that should bring relief

when I would rather have you here

and pull down your pants

and panties

and have you

and get my relief

from one as hot as this summer heat.

31.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

Yesterday I was swimming

half past nine in the evening

on the lake, the beach was empty,

the Sun was caught in the foliage,

the dark waters glimmering

in its evening light

cast as a glowing path,

all the sounds of nature

and people gone,

and embraced by the water

alone in the landscape

but for the insects

skimming the surface

I floated on the evening waters.

28.-29.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

AND WHITE-BLUE THE SKY

The early evening darkens,

bursts in beating rain,

wind rattling the window frames,

and then it's gone,

the wind and the rain and the dark

begetted by the clouds,

and white-blue the sky

spreads over green and golden land.

29.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

MY FRIDGE MAGNET

I have such a fabulous fridge magnet

that each time I go to the fridge

I forget all about food

and would need to take a cold shower

if I would be one

who would want to resist temptation...

25.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

I SHOULD GO SWIMMING

Afternoon, and I should go,

walk to beach and swim

for I bought new swimming trunks

after the old ones got lost

somewhere

just so that I could go

into the dark waters of the lake,

but there's death

walking across our shared reality,

and I'm still rooted here,

trying to shout about his passing,

the trail of blood and corpses

that is carved through of our existence,

that maims us all.

24.07.2025

JOUNI KORHONEN

After posting a photograph of his dog

and the vegan casserole he made for his wife

Jouni Korhonen replies to a post

made by a member of the parliament,

declaring that she has no right to speak

about the genocide and famine

in Israeli occupied Palestine's Gaza Strip

and that she must be silent about Gaza

and speak about only what happens here,

because what happens in Gaza will happen.

Then Jouni Korhonen posts

another photograph of his dog.

24.07.2025

IN BETHLEHEM

In Bethlehem king Herod kills the youth again:

Ahmad Ali Salah and Mohammad Khaled Issa,

fifteen both, slain by Herod's men

because - so claim Herod's men -

they tried to throw flaming bottles

on an Apartheid road at al-Khader town,

the immediate sentence being death.

Four children killed in two days in West Bank alone

while on the shores of the Roman sea

vast streams of blood in Gaza flow.

And here our Satrapy tells us

it would be wrong to sanction king Herod,

for in the eyes of our Satrapy those

who stand against Herod's rule

are the ones who are wrong;

the servants of the Satrap, smiling, announce

that we must denounce, blame

the deaths on them who fight

and do not kneel before Antipater's son,

and instead we must oppose

them and those

who would act to stop the slaughter,

for the slaughter is good and just,

blessed by the emperor in Washington.

This is what the Satrap's men declare,

announcing they will go,

seek adress and talk with Herod,

and talking with him,

ask more arms from the king,

for his arms they are daily tested

and daily drenched

in the blood of innocents

and this our Satrapy finds good and just.

24.07.2025

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III - OR SO FARES HISTORY WHEN TURNED INTO ART

Fourteen years rush past

in what are

                   at most but weeks

flowing from Shakespeare's pen,

three hours on the stage:

Back on the throne Edward IV

immediately dies, 

                              a dozen years erased,

and off from seizing the throne

                                                      past hasty executions

to his death Richard rides,

while Margaret of Anjou

lives a second life

                              that lasts

beyond the duel on Bosworth field

that never was.

23.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

WHY WE MUST GO ON

I can handle all the deaths,

even my own,

if the lives that end

are part of something eternal,

if there's hope

that they could be

echoing

through endless future.

Otherwise,

there's no point.

Only continued meaning

makes life worth it.

I believe in that worth,

I have hope

that all our lives

will echo through endless future.

23.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S OTHELLO

Jago isn't a devilish master manipulator,

his crude plots entangle simpletons,

idiots like Othello. No wonder

we don't see Othello lead an army and win,

for this man on the page and stage

can't even think for himself. Sheer

luck defeats the Ottomans. There's

no subtlety or depth here, tragedy

can be found only in the women,

victims of one crude plotter

and a bunch of gullible simpletons.

Lambs taken to slaughter

would see where they are being taken

and fight more than Othello

and Roderigo against their fate.

19.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

RSF/JANJAWEED HAS KILLED 350-400 PEOPLE IN SUDAN'S NORTH KORDOFAN STATE

The Janjaweed massacred 300 people

in Sudan's North Kordofan state,

or perhaps 450, in three days

of slaughter, from July Tenth

to July Thirteenth; then it took almost a week

for the news of the carnage to come out,

and the exact numbers are still unclear.

It could be 'just' 300, it probably is around 450.

At least 35 children are confirmed

to be among the killed, the murdered,

and two pregnant women,

but the United Nations expects that number to rise

as more information is gotten. It's

all down to local authorities and organizations

to count the dead, with the UN

verifying what it can, 90 lives lost.

It seems there is little

in the way of photographs or videos

to record the slaughter. When

it comes to occupied Palestine's Gaza Strip

the international news media uses the excuse

that Apartheid Israel's regime doesn't let them in.

For Sudan there are no excuses.

The journalists could go. But they are not sent

beyond Khartoum or Port Sudan.

When it comes to Gaza,

the international news media has reduced reporting,

claiming that their audiences are tired

of seeing news about Gaza,

when it's just them themselves that are tired

of doing their job, it seems.

But when it comes to Sudan,

even that lame excuse doesn't work:

Audiences can't be tired of what they have

hardly been shown at all.

And what kind of audience made of moral people

would tire of seeing news about genocides

in Sudan and occupied Palestine?

18.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

THESE ARE DARK DAYS

I slept long, nineteen or twenty hours

with few interruptions,

and all my plans for yesterday

went awry, and then,

awake, I was caught

on the computer again,

for there had been much killing

of innocents when I had been asleep,

sleeping away the last hours

in the lives of others,

and I had to do something,

even if it was to share the news

and and my anger towards

those who decided to let the slaughter

go on. Thus went eight hours,

then my muse came online,

and the talk of tornadoes, fallen trees,

poems, pope perhaps not as courageous

as they should be, naming

what should be named for the sake

of the dead whose killer's name

should be known, and that,

that was a pleasure as one day

turned to another and the night

is again dark as the summer slowly

wanes. And while I write this,

others will have perished,

for these are dark days,

whatever the season.

18.07.2025

YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE

You have to choose between the child

cowering under the bombs

and the occupying regime

bombing the child.

You can't pretend to be neutral,

or somehow to be a friend to both.

If you don't act, those bombs

and the regime dropping them

are going to kill that child

just like they have killed

18 000 others kids

while you stood by.

14.06.2024-15.07.2025

THE DYING PALESTINIAN BOY

To Ursula von der Leyen, Antonio Costa, Kaja Kallas and Roberta Metsola.

The wounded child on the video

recorded three days ago

appears dead; then he gasps,

breathes laboriously. He is dying.

Perhaps twelve, thirteen, fourteen

- around that age. Little is done

for him. Little can be done,

in occupied Palestine's Gaza.

Those who hold the power

in this world allowed Israel

to wound him, and they also

allowed Israel to destroy the hospitals

and stop medical aid from getting in,

making his death inevitable.

Elsewhere he could have been saved.

Elsewhere he wouldn't have been wounded.

Elsewhere - or in a world

where the lives of children

living under brutal military occupation,

under genocidal Apartheid regime, matter.

He will die, killed by Israel

and those who hold the power

in this world. His life

mattered nothing to them,

to Israel and those who hold the power

in this world and adore,

worship Israel. So he is breathing

his last, his life is ending

with painful gasps, perhaps

there's blood or fluid in his lungs.

He was sacrificed, because...

Israel. A human sacrifice,

one of one hundred thousand,

one of tens of thousands of children

sacrificed so that it would be made clear

to everyone on this tormented planet

that Israel is above all laws,

that Israel is above all morality,

that Israel... - whatever those who hold the power

in this world in their madness utter

when they worship their great god Israel

and His manifestation in flesh,

Benyamin Netanyahu. I say to you,

this child's life mattered

nothing to you, you who hold the power

in this world, but his life mattered,

his life mattered more than yours,

his painful respiration as life ebbed

was worth more than all the long decades

of your lives, all that you have ever done

or ever will. He was a human being.

You are shells of human beings,

filled with the dust of what once was.

15.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

HOW MY LATE EVENING WENT TODAY

In the end I made a detour

to the news of the genocide,

almost got lost there,

spreading an hour or two

what everyone should know,

then made my way

to Edward Thomas as I intended,

but it was a different poem

than the ones I had in mind,

one that I couldn't pass,

and after that polished one

old translation by Augusta Webster,

translated two by Charles Simic

from London Book of Reviews in 2017,

and now it's half past eleven

and the pastel colours have faded,

dark silhouettes of trees

stand against gray-blue sky

and I think of the calendar

I promised to my muse

and will try to deliver this sweltering night,

after I have made another pot of coffee

to get through those two poems

by Edward Thomas

that have waited me eleven decades.

14.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

WAKING UP FULLY IN THE EVENING

The coffee wakes me,

hot liquid

makes slow thoughts stream,

so I turn to Edward Thomas,

poor, tormented Edward

who had to me

near perfect life around writing

and family in the country,

but like us all

wanted something else

and having gotten it

writing poems

went and got himself killed.

14.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

TO JUSSI THE CAT

A year gone, there's emptiness

in the rooms where you gave

company when you felt

you needed some,

where the windows had to be closed

and are now open in summer

as you can't make a daring jump

to the world waiting outside,

front door open often now

when you can't run away

to some adventure

that could have ended in the mouth

of the fox or the lynch.

So now I hear the rain beginning

from the open window,

behind the window whose glass

would separate your gaze

from all that intrigued

you behind the walls

that were your world.

If there is something beyond,

there's freedom to wander,

go the wide world and no teeth

of fox or lynch will catch you.

14.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

MAKING COFFEE

The first pot of coffee in the evening

is dropping, the coffee maker

louder than the wind

sighing beyond the open window.

After nine hours or eight I awoke

tired, I could sleep

another nine hours or eight

but I have Edward Thomas waiting,

has been waiting for days

to change the garb of language,

and I want to go and walk the gravel roads

in the late evening's silence,

think of the days long gone and close

when all emptiness was filled

with life and presence

and even promise, something

that hovered in the future

just out of sight

and dissolved, giving way to this.

So the coffee ready, I will

drink myself awake, translate

and go and walk and arrive nowhere

except understanding of what

I already possess.

14.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

REACHING BACK TO THE MORNING LIGHT

I take to words,

the only road that reaches

to those fading hours

of the morning,

lost in the intervening time

cast into abyss of forgetting;

from these gentle colours

and the sighing wind of the evening

make my back to those hours

before I laid down and forgot time,

put it is all props

in the mind, the fields

in bright green and gold

and sky in deep blue

hiding the faint, gentle colours

of this evening

when no bird sings

behind the facades I erect

in my mind to pass by.

14.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

EVENING

Evening in pastel colours

and slight wind

after thunder in the afternoon

and hours of dreamless sleep,

the morning bright

in sunlight like an another land

from which one came,

an exile. 

14.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

Poetry Poem Poems Verse

ON THE PRAIRIE

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn

and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers,

threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea...

Carl Sandburg(1878-1967): Prairie, Cornhuskers(1918).

This is the myth of the colonialist,

one sentence to describe genocide

that ended 13 000 years

of presence, history -

"a thousand red men cried and went away" -

and then the abundant description,

good and ill, of the re-creation

of the land by those

who took the land,

whose taking of the land goes unacknowledged,

the people whose land

it was 

just going away like an ebbing tide

followed by the great tsunami

of those "million white men"

in the myth of the colonialist.

But the colonialist is ever afraid,

in the undocumented people toiling

on his fields he sees conquerors

who will remake the land,

and in himself the one

who would, one day, cry and go away

in the myths of those now toiling

on his fields, the fields

his ancestors took and planted full of corn,

golden fields reddening in the sunset 

(Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields,

the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?),

the past living in him

(not a bucket of ashes, but a flickering fire)

telling how the myths of the future will erase

250 years of presence, history,

leaving him in a single sentence

to pass away in the new beginning

of the still toiling conquerors.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to

him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a

thousand years is short.

14.07.2025

REUTERS OR THE COURAGE OF THE WESTERN PRESS

On a day that Israel killed

two journalists,

Fadi Khalifa

and Hossam al-Adhouni

with his wife

and their three children

in occupied Palestine's Gaza,

the venerable news agency

Reuters is eager to tell

its audience, assure them,

that Israel's killing

of six children

as they waited for water in Gaza

was a result of a 'malfunction of a missile'

- just an innocent mistake,

nothing more.

14.07.2025

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

Poetry Poem Poems Verse