We Are Not Invisible

©Shutterstock

Sabahat Ali, USA

An ode to the innocent Palestinian civilians. 

There are no stories left to tell.
You know them all. You know them well.
And are at liberty to choose:
The ones to keep, the ones to lose.

O what a time to live, to be;
a time to look but not to see.
To turn away, pretend and hide
“We’ll act like it’s not genocide.”

To know that men and women die
To know that bombs and bodies fly
A bloodbath drawn by smoking gun
To blast the children as they run.

And as a dying father rests
His bleeding baby on his chest
The Gazan sky bursts into tears –
Her cries fall dead on western ears.

The frozen moment ‘fore he dies
The last he sees with streaming eyes 
Is that the heroes never came.
For that – we have ourselves to blame

Some deaths don’t end with death, you see.
When humans are no longer free
Confined to cages made of hate
With no way out – no door, no gate.

They wonder why we won’t go in
As though to save them were a sin
The silence of our world is loud
Who hide like cowards, yet are proud

Proud of the way we just looked on
Proud of the boundaries we’ve drawn
Proud of our inhumanity
Proud of the vicious vanity

What is this so-called self-defence?
Rained down at blameless life’s expense?
They lived, they laughed, they loved, they died
And all to fuel a dragon’s pride

What if we bottled up our tears?
To smother flames, extinguish fears?
We’ve wept a salt–mine at this strife
So call us mad for wanting life

Nobel – where is their prize for peace?
The men whose massacres won’t cease?
Who revel in a baby’s scream
And kill before it dares to dream

So if a conscience there is left
If humankind is not bereft
Of feeling for his fellow man
Then maybe – just maybe – we can.

This twisted Information Age
Is beautiful as any cage
Curtained with murals of the free
With blood of those we’ll never see.

There are no stories left to tell.
You know them all. You know them well.
And are at liberty to choose:
The ones to keep, the ones to lose.

About the Author: Sabahat Ali is an imam of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Silicon Valley, USA. He serves as a member of the editorial board and is also editor of The Existence Project for The Review of Religions.