Mosab Abu Toha, et al: Ceasefire Cento

In response to an invitation in mid-October, 2023, within days writers from many communities sent their own lines or lines by others to join in the worldwide demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Traditionally, the cento is a patchwork or collage poem. This “Ceasefire Cento” is an urgent collective call in a time of devastation and institutional attempts at silencing. Please share it widely, read it in public, print it out, deliver it to public officials, do whatever you can to keep it going. Thank you to the contributors. Thank you for reading and sending it on. And thank you, Vox Populi! — Kathryn Levy & Kathy Engel

Ceasefire Cento

They didn’t find a place to bury you.
They carried you on their shoulders,
The houses never saw you.
They’ve already packed their bags.
Mosab Abu Toha, Oct 17, 2023
.

We all long to write the poem that will stop this death.

All I ask is time,
blank time: some rest from frenzy, breathing room
till my fate can teach my beaten spirit how to grieve.

The wall
Dissolves
A man sits in the rubble of his house
weeping for his children.

This is a body enfleshed,
Like yours. This is a body
broken, like mine. See how
we stutter through rubble,
wounded, till we fall.

Touch the tips of your fingers together:
Count to ten:
You, who are whole

Maybe missiles didn’t arc from the blue
and dig trenches into these riverbanks . . .
They make a desolation and call it peace.
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
There is everything to forgive. You can’t forgive me

If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle . . .

Could anyone have wanted it that way?
Who could have wanted it that way?
Look in the mirror.

I cross my fork and spoon
To ward off complicity

Your screams – from my mouth.
My tears – flooding your face.
Enemies – on either side of the mirror.

Are we human when we are insane
Are we breath when we kill

check for broken glass before lying down, before resting on the hard, ashen ground
look before lying down on the bed of sky atop the wreckage of
fire, wild, search the gray sky, far and wide

Air, Water, Land, Trees, Energy
Natural forces belonging to this planet, abundant, indivisible and in a constant flux . . .
Raid, Stoppage, Grabbed, Destroyed, Cut . . .a . . .men

And my dream for the children of Palestine
is that they are free
to run and laugh in the streets, bathed in love.

Brooklyn sky hospital child in my arms so new unbroken blue with life
In Palestine the children watch the sky watch life break break break break
what to do with all of this breath but think of them and speak

The comfortable knowing that the plane
flying overhead holds passengers of the sky
is a privilege we all deserve.

Never again happens again
and again. Allowing genocide to happen
is horrific . . . The death toll climbs,
numbers so vast I can’t even picture them

We Want To Live

The dead decompose under
the clock of cities.
This is the world, friend,
where they have money for
war but can’t feed the poor.

At night the low drumroll
Where I can raise the voices of the dead
Again, without walls. Built and torn down

We wanted so badly for the world to be different.
It feels as if we are living in the massive regret
of a God who has already destroyed the world.

The children (young, old, ancestral, in us)
need peace to survive and thrive

We will try again,
despite our losses, despite the risk
that it will leave us unrecognizable

Oh, Israel, you dropped six thousand
bombs on Gaza last weekend.
How many have you already killed?
My grief is grieving
I am wailing

Each morning
I wake
in the shape
of an ancient
song: weapon
desperate
to betray its
design.

. . . blackguards and murderers
under cover of their offices
accuse the world of those villainies
which they themselves invent to
torture us . . ..

Some suck blood, some strangle you like vines,
drones and thwacks, a helicopter somewhere
only just learning he’s been sent to kill.
No more money to the war machine.
Not in this lifetime, not in any lifetime.

Mothers and children stood in long lines, terrified.
I even dare to shout across the shadows
uselessly filling all the roads with grief.

. . . lost seventeen members of his family in a single moment.
They were sheltering in place in their home in Gaza.
Seventeen universes. Seventeen pure, beautiful,
perfect constellations. Seventeen holy fragments of God.

Say this: Official weapons, no more beautiful than underground weapons.
Say, lifetime oppression makes people crazy.

Palestinian children should be going to school, playing with friends, talking about their
dreams and hopes.

The students ask me to explain.
As a teacher, do I fail them if all I can do is keep my eyes open
and weep?

Hurt, hungry, harassed, howling they arrived at the temple of light, health, refuge:
the hospital
to be murdered, in the hundreds, while the country smolders undefined
and we prepare pacific centos.

Never Again is Now.
As long as there is breath in my body
I shine the light on “never again” every day . . .

No water, no food
no medicine, no fuel
Buildings are laid to rubble, all black, no cats
A blue sky shimmers above in fear, clouds dishevel and separate with smoke
Brackish water distorts drinkers faces with slime

We Want to Live

My peace is no damned bomb or sword or war
In a fist of agony or iron – but whispers of
Children, not thorns, for gardens that belong to all
Have mercy, for the sake of all that is holy, so that we may show our children
How to live and be better than us.

There is blood mixing with khamsin and rocket fuel in the air. Ouds are now
kindling & olive trees are splinters to their roots

what words even matter
but NO . . . STOP . . . NOT IN OUR NAMES

Now Gaza, the Jews, barbed wire in the mouth,
burst flesh of babies, whole country a deathbed.

Some claim there are two sides, but the world is round.
Violence is round, too, but it doesn’t have to be.
We simply need to learn all tears spring from the same well.

We Want to Live

I could never
get to the end of my singing to you
of what I love

You wailing a grief that will never end, grief as long as the curving river, as deep as
the salted sea
You typing feverishly into the night, writing to the world the only thing to say:
we are human, we are human, we
are of the land, we are salt and sand and wind and blood and bone
You are who I love

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war

It was easy to be roulette about next year
sunsetting and sunrising, and to disappear
into endings. No discord, no duress.

Tell them we are from here

When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake

. . . A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its affirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses…

Helen Keller’s ghost posts from Gaza: I feel
the house collapse. On a blind woman. Not seeing
a way out. Smelling the acrid smoke with her last breath.

. . . and whom we leave there, now, to die
I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see
And this will never be tolerated as an excuse

Know the context, speak the truth

We Want to Live

Luminous wanderers: hoist
and behold the lost territory
the buzzing prayers

On October 16th, UN Security Council delegates from the United States,
the United Kingdom, France and Japan
block a resolution for a ceasefire in the Palestine-Israel crisis.
On October 17th, an airstrike on a Gazan hospital
kills at least 500 civilians. “Security” Council?

I just want my son to know his colors and live

My child, my brightest star—
if I lost you—
I too would detonate with grief

Cease. Fire.
You whom I do not know I wish to know.
Hello, stranger. Hello, you whom I wish to call friend.
Wherever this goes I hope this goes towards love.

We want reparations for the Palestinians—ethnic cleansing
You know—the stolen land, the bombs, the starvation, the dehydration
All that, all that, all that, all that

name and repair this torn fabric
name and repair this living grief

All of us matter. It is always about all of us mattering.

There should be no brigades of fire.
The problem after a war is with the victor.
He thinks he’s just proved that war and violence pay.
Who will now teach him a lesson?

Justice is always first.

Cease the fire, not the flames
Of spirits and souls, little lights and the old.
We must raise our voices for Palestine. We must not allow our voices
to be silenced.

Does the massacre of innocents exist beyond
the reach of words? Does unspeakable violence
compel us even more to speak? In a single
syllable, “yes” or “no,” the future world depends.

Your soul knows rivers. Yes.
This experiment. Obscure your soul in this machine. They will.
Whisper you ghost in your own face. We transcended the science. Long time.

wailing boys turned men
dehumanized brown flesh, dig
unmarkable graves

. . . they planted stones in
Our mouths so that nothing
Will grow . . .

There is everything to forgive. You can’t forgive me.
May our hearts break and never be mended if we let this genocide happen.

What if we all were brave, what if we called an enemy beloved
made love to them under a cypress tree, what a revolution, what noise,
It might bring all the birds back to Gaza—

Every child is my child Gaza
Water to a child’s lips Gaza
One million children Gaza

There is no other child who is this one. There is no other nurse who is this one.
There is no other hand eye tooth bone. There is no other sibling, no other tree.
The rulers kill the world and say their stupid words. Their sounds waste breath and
with their lives they kill life.

And the wind has enfolded you—
how the wilderness prays for you
And forgetfulness has been hailed.

I wish children didn’t die.
I wish they would be temporarily
elevated to the skies until the war ends.
Then they would return home safe,
and when their parents ask them:
“Where were you?”
They would say:
“We were playing with the clouds.”

“Daughter”, Gaza called. “Come!”
The door swung open.

—–

Contributors:

Shermin Ahmed
Indran Amirthanayagam
Judith Baumel
Margo Berdeshevsky
Tamiko Beyer
Heather Bowlan
Sarah Browning
Nikole Cappiello
Kenneth F Carroll
Grace Cavalieri
Sharon Charde
Marlena Chertock
Mona Chopra
Tamar Cole
Martha Collins
Kia Corthron
Steven Cramer
Alexis De Veaux
Sarah M. Duncan
Sokari Ekine
Ella Engel-Snow
Kathy Engel
Adam Falkner
Catherine Filloux
Gerald Fleming
Ru Freeman
Joanna Fuhrman
Steven G. Fullwood
Ross Gay
Jules Gibbs
Aracelis Girmay
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Sean Hanrahan
Richard Hoffman
Bob Holman
Camisha Jones
Richard Krawiec
Yahia Lababidi
Gabe Lashley
Raina J. León
Kathryn Levy
Maureen N. McLane
Lisa Suhair Majaj
Tony Medina
Diane Mehta
Caits Meissner
Askold Melnyczuk
Yesenia Montilla
Bhumika Muchhala
Sham-e-Ali Nayeem
Refilwe Nkomo
Naomi Shihab Nye
Tema Okun
Melissa Olson
Rebecca Pacheco
Sarah Passino
Mark Pawlak
Junauda Petrus
Larissa Pham
Steven Ratiner
Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Sherod Santos
Johnna Schmidt
Lloyd Schwartz
Erin Sharkey
Kriti Sharma
Julie Sheehan
Michael Simms
Bruce Smith
Patricia Spears Jones
Jane Springer
Fiona Teng
Samantha Thornhill
Mosab Abu Toha
Christy Tronnier
Miho Tsujii
Melissa Tuckey
Pavithra Vasudevan
Naomi Wallace
Lynne Walter
Michael Waters
Derrick Weston Brown
Mama Nia Wilson
Narkita Wiley
Kathi Wolfe
Lisa Wujnovich

Quotations from Other Writers:

Virgil, Aeneid (tr. Robert Fagles)
Mahmoud Darwish, “Under Siege” (tr. Marjolijn de Jager)
William Stafford, “Objector”
W.C. Williams, “In Chains”
Virgil, Aeneid (tr. Sarah Ruden)
Denise Levertov, “Making Peace”
James Baldwin, “Staggerlee wonders”
Nazim Hikmet, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (tr. Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk)
Danusha Lameris, “Arabic”
Osip Mandelstam, “Leningrad” (tr. Bernard Meares)
Adrienne Rich, “For the Record”
A.J. Muste, Statement in 1941
Faraj Bayrakdar, A Dove in Free Flight
Ghassan Kanafani, “I wish children didn’t die . . .”
Tobi Ogundiran, “The Clockmaker and His Daughter”

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This poem is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.