I have no psalm for this.

Only
the sound of God
dragging her hand
|through ash,
searching
for the shape
of a child
She once dreamed.

There are no angels here.
They refused to descend.
They feared the light
that does not forgive them.

What lies in Gaza now
is older than war
older than wrong.

It is the kind of silence
that speaks only
to those
willing to die
for listening.

Do you feel that, priest?
This isn’t grief.

That is God
amputated from his own body.

That is Gaza
screaming in a dialect older
than creation.

You speak?
you dare speak|
of sides, of justice, of peace?

Peace is a liar
that kissed the bullet
before it entered the child’s jaw.

Peace is the perfume
of empire,

a sedative piped in veins
so sleepers dream of justice
while chewing
the bones
of the holy.

And still
the tree grows.

Not out of hope,
From disobedience.

It dares
to place green
into a sky
that spits fire.

That is what love is.

Stubborn.
A blossom
in the throat of a grave.

You want love?

Then stand
where fathers have become
their own dust.

Then carry your grief,
like it was born in you.

Let it unbutton your chest

and place
in your hands
a name you do not recognise
but know belongs
to you.

Because we are not separate.
Not in this.

Gaza is not an elsewhere.
Sudan is not a shadow.
Congo is not a myth.
Ukraine is not another’s burden.

They are the edges
where your skin
forgets
it ends.

Laws?

What are laws
to the mother
who has outlived her entire house?

What is language
to the dust
that speaks only in bones?

What is justice
when the world
refuses to be born?

And yet
something grows
in the skull
of the fallen house.

A petal
A song.

A defiance
rooted to deep
even the gods
must stop and listen.

It says:
I remain.
I remember.
I refuse
to forget.

This, too,
is God.

Not the one who watches.
But the one
who cannot
look away.

So let the poets howl.
Let the sky split.
Let every drone rot in mid-air.

Let the empire implode
beneath the weight
of one
broken cradle.

For justice is not a verdict.

It is the burning tongue
of God
re-inserting herself
into the story.

And this time,
She will not come
with parables

but with the eyes
of a child
in Rafah

and the fury
of a mother
in Deir al-Balah,
whose womb
became a courtroom
and whose tears
wrote
the final law.

The land remembers.
The sea does not forgive.
The olive tree
weeps oil.

And in the centre
of the world,
where prophets bled truth

a child picks up a stone,

Not to throw,
but to remember
what hands were made for
before they were taught
to beg,
before they learned
the physics of bombs.

Call it rage.
Call it prayer.

Call it the final breath
of a planet
that refused
to forget.

Gaza,
the part of us
that never learned
to kneel
before
what is broken.

She is
what still burns
when every temple
has turned to dust.

She is the prayer
that prays
back.