Michael Simms: Ishmael
I’m not prepared to measure grief
like grains of darkness
Nicholas Kristof: What we get wrong about Israel and Gaza
I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.
Abby Zimet: In What Is Called A War (Trigger Warning — graphic violence)
Over 420 children a day are killed or injured, roughly one every 10 minutes; over 2,000 children are missing under the rubble, and likely dead; 70% of the dead are children and women…
Zeina Azzam, Andy Young, David Adès: Three poems about Gaza
Only the children, terrified, wide-eyed,
have no complicity as we lead them, again,
sacrificial lambs to the slaughter.
Julia Conley: Biden Staffers Report Silencing of Dissent in White House on Gaza Horror
Numerous staff members have had interactions in the last week and a half that left them feeling as though any criticism of Israel’s U.S.-backed onslaught in Gaza, which has killed roughly 3,450 Palestinians, will not be tolerated.
Sabine Oishi: When the US bombed Switzerland
Although Switzerland was not actively involved in WWII, it suffered a total of seventy bombings by Allied airplanes between 1940 and 1945.
Michael T. Young: The Spoils of War
A little girl grips the one toy she was
allowed to carry away through crowds
stumbling together from their homes.
Lasse Söderberg: The dead children in the Tajo River
They have left the city
and their blind games
under the white bone of the sun
Video: The Kites
A girl is playing on the green slopes of a valley in Kurdistan, on the border between Iran and Iraq, when her kite is suddenly swept across the river by the wind. Three boys on the other side see her calling for help, but cannot make out what she is saying: she is just too far away. Separated by the river, the children try to communicate with each other – yet between them lie the explosive remnants of past wars.
Abayomi Animashaun: Collateral Damage
In the orchards, the old revolutionaries
Have gathered again for tea
Richard Hoffman: Uvalde, TX, 5/24/2022
That his dead
brother he
bringing him home.
Cynthia Atkins: The Last Cricket Standing
The women are lighting Shabbos candles
with Molotov Cocktails — A baby is passed to arms
on a train.
Video: Nadine Burke Harris | How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime
Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain.
Kathleen O’Toole: Starlings (corrected version)
My mind suddenly shifts
to tally one week’s arithmetic of grief:
eighty children among the hundreds killed
in a fine-tuned cone of shrapnel
