Anguish, Everything All At Once, Enough
Three Short Poems from an Egyptian-American Poet
By Ahmed Afifi
Anguish
Anguished screams crying out for the last time,
Belonging to innocent faces that will never smile again.
Children are starved to death,
While settlers celebrate blocking aid.
Palestine cries out,
While the west oversees its strangulation.
Everything all at once
Do you ever feel like a sponge that’s soaking up all the sorrow and misery that is constantly surrounding us?
It gets to be too much but then I’m stuck feeling selfish.
How could I pause to think about myself when all this death and destruction going on in the world is happening?
There’s times I wish my emotions had an off switch so I could tune It all out and be numb.
But at the same time, understanding all that pain and feeling that grief may be the only way humanity survives.
Enough
So much pain and suffering
Surrounding us from outside and within
How long can you go on simply surviving
before something gives?
Was It always meant to be this hard
Or did centuries of human greed, exploitation, and cruelty finally catch up to us?
How much can a single person take before they are no longer able to?
Ahmed Afifi is a Egyptian-American who devotes his time and energy in the halls of Congress demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza.
While I lay in my bed trying to decide to get up or wait a while longer - the luxury of a retired life - my mind was asking so many questions for which I have no answers.
Your poems have so eloquently articulated my feelings.
Will humans ever recover from this immense pain?
Even when I close my ears and eyes from the scene of horror that flash before me, I can only imagine what a mother of a young baby/ child feels what she sees, an old grandparent grieving after burying their grandchildren. A child with an empty bowl in his hand with an unsaid question written on his face. “You adults ! What have I done to deserve this from you?”
How will we humans who live in the lap of luxury just a few miles from this catastrophic disaster recover from this?
The money that comes from this enterprise of WMDs will stay on earth while you go down in the pit empty-handed. All those names of killers of children of war are only mentioned in disgust and shame when we do.
They
‘ When Will They Ever Learn? Will They Ever Learn?’
Zmurrad
#freepalestine indeed
🇵🇸♥️💪