Canto for David

10 poems about Israel and Palestine¹

AI ‘art’ – The desert night is full of longing

Introduction

“Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Go learn.“

― Hillel the Elder, Talmud, Shabbath 31a (Judaism’s Golden Rule)

Ten poems to remind us to never let our souls become hostage to whatever is hateful in this world.²

This Canto is dedicated to all the Palestinian, Jewish and Israeli people that struggle for justice and that choose to never forget all victims of crimes against humanity and the common humanity in us all.³

Mantle is dedicated to Gideon Levy.

Korban is dedicated to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 Poland – 1972 US)

For the dispossessed, the suffering and the weak: remember that they need our voices of support now as ever they have.

This Canto aims to reminds us of the echoes and reflections that make up history – its cyclical nature where abused becomes abuser. Now a new tribe takes the historic place of the Jews as the undefended vilified other:

“Condemned as wandering Jews

to roam the world and meditate

upon their unforgivable sin

and the vengeance of victims.“

― Yahia Lababidi, Palestine Wail

No one can dehumanise another without losing something of their own soul. Good parents and leaders know this.

Sadly many of the leaders in Israel, the United States of America and Gaza are extremists, that see the suffering of Israelis and Palestinians as merely tools for their political ends (aka terrorists).

We have seen this story before and ultimately dehumanisation and destruction of a people ends up destroying the obvious victims and then the villains (and those that support them actively or in their passivity).

Peace to all those that seek it.

Table of Contents

Chutzpah

What could it do

To a people to learn

So many family members

Were beaten and burned?

Humiliated,

Massacred and

Hounded

From home.

Across countries,

Centuries.

Culled in crusades,

Murdered by Catholics

In Castille, Seville, Aragon

Who preached a ‘universal’ spirit

Of hatred of other faiths, other people

And were themselves

Immune to Jesus.

‘Encouraged’ to convert

By inquisitive Christians

Nothing you did was enough,

To keep you safe.

Expelled again

En masse.

Arriving somewhere new

With little more

Than hope and each other

(though there is little else)

To rebuild your lives, in places like:

Odessa, Kishinev,

Salonika, Warsaw.

We all know how that ended.

The hell where words must fail.

It takes gumption,

Mass murder.

Especially

The women and children.

Your people have long known,

Too many have the stomach for it.

After so many losses

Your wandering family

Now has a home

To be defended

With everything you have.

You refuse the historic victim role,

There is nowhere else you will ever go.

It takes chutzpah,

Writing poems

About humanity

And suffering

To the Israelites.

(Though I try

To be a gentle guy).

Forgive me:

I would have spoken out too

For your people

In their great suffering.

But not because

You are Jewish,

Or I am a Jew.

It is because we are brothers

(From a different mother)

And we know

What men can do,

That I must speak to you.

Mantle

Each day we watch

Astonished

As you grow in strength

Into your blood feathers

Terrifying juvenile

Your prayers are for prey

All you see is your suffering

Everything not you

Must be sacrificed, slew

Awed

As you spread your wings

Covering part of the world

With darkness

Falling fast into your

Kill

Tyranny

Fully-fledged

*dedicated to Gideon Levy

Korban

Another day

Wrestling with God

Nothing is forgiven

Someone has to pay

Something must be given

Unholy offering

There is no promised land

Fragrant with the fruits of compassion

You, who will not paint the houses

With the blood of your cousins,

Deserve to enter

Go back or be silent

Whilst we build

A new paradise

For our people

Willing to

Sacrifice

Everything

Even Adonai

*Dedicated to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 Poland – 1972 US)

The Witching Hour

Who will watch the

Unwatched

Time

When seconds

Smear

And the day

Slowly tears

Leaking out

Listen carefully

And you might hear:

The stripling spirits

Suspire

As the freighted minutes

Calve and collapse

Into the viscous

Liquid hour

A waiting baiting time

For law abiding

Punctual men

Stood poised

Ready for

The bitter business

(with their tired scissors)

Can you hear them?

They are coming…

The unchilding time

Hush now

Be oh so quiet that

You and I might sleep

Our bodies

Complicit

Safe in our silence

The time of fear

For amber children

Criminals or

Pre-crime

If left unarrested

Trapped by history

In the dying hours of the day

They are

Coming out

Ready or not

It’s 2 a.m.

Again.

Ark

“I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.”

(Genesis 6:13)

Find something you love:

A girl or a boy,

A wife or grandma,

Your favourite doll.

Something beautiful, useful,

Venerable, vulnerable:

That can burst

Into flames

In a heartbeat

In the raining fire

Take them to the boat

Bring everything

You can fit

Into your little bag

Be ready to sail

At the drop of a hat

In a New York minute

Escape that scorched earth

Still ringing with

The tumult of killing

And stench of race-hate

A never ending

Un-winnable war

Where victor and vanquished

Are equally shamed

In their various ways

(Though the death-toll

Tells a different score)

And start again,

In God’s grace.

All God wants

Is for you

To start again,⁴

To be cleansed.

Go somewhere safe

(Hopefully warm,

A gentle reminder of home)

Far from the

Maddening bombs

Remember

Your loved ones

What you have lost

Though you may mend

The scars will remain

Listen, can you hear

The god of all things

Sing:

Flee the fiery flood,

Begin again, again, again.

Twenty To One

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.“

(Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, circa 431 B.C.E)

…They killed twenty

Poles

(women and children)

Piled their bodies up

Right on that very same spot

Where we had knifed

The Nazi bastard

(turned out

he was human

after all)

It was the very next day

I guess a pithy way to say

You are worth

So very little

Compared to us

Every death

Shall be repaid

Twenty-fold

In blood

And terror

Message received

(though we kept on fighting)

A terrible lesson learned

Passed over

With the flame that

Flickered and nearly died

A ‘gift’ to those few

Survivors that made it

Through the horror

To the homeland

The gift that keeps on giving

For new generations

Though this time

A different tribe

Of God’s children

Shall learn

The hard ways of hate

(or indifference)

At the hands of the strong

The weak

Who now suffer

What they must

Who must now

Suffer us

Or die trying⁵

Mensch & Meat

We gave bloody battle

Then violent death

To the meat

Filthy dogs

Dared bite the hand

That feeds

Vile vermin

That keeps forgetting

To be forgotten

Insisting on their history

Their suffering

Deserving annihilation

We forced them off

So this land could flower

Under our fair hand

We have watered

The desert

With their tears

The strong city

A charnel-scented

Slaughterhouse

And so it goes…

Hear, O God,

The song of

Mensch and meat.

If This Is A Man

We questioned him hard,

hammered him

watched him break into a thousand pieces and

shards.

Then he gave us what we wanted.

He begged and cried.

that’s one of their tricks to try to make us stop,

nice try!!

We warned them all, fuck around and find out.

now he’s been fucked around.

We did it to teach them all, to revenge our dead,

we enjoyed it to that end.

Anyway, it’s not gay

to fuck an animal.

Looking at him makes me sick, how could a man fall so low?

This is all on him, and his terrorist friends.

We’re the good guys,

thank Hashem.

The Masters

Is there a bright line

That separates

Indifference and contempt

From the darker

Urge to exterminate?

Surely it is a journey of a thousand steps…

That leads over the

Mountains of Deceit

Down through the

Gorge of Avarice

Passing the

Plains of

Ignorance and thence

Through the well trodden

Valleys of Violence

Until we are led

To the promised

Uplit lands

(Where our failures and shame

Can be consigned to

History, which is only ever

Preserved in the dark)

At last our self-hate

Can evaporate

In the bright

Destroying sun

This must be the long

Promised place

Where we will never be

Prey again

Shalom for us, at last

Arriving we notice the others

Still in our midst

They were useful (for a while)

For cleaning and carrying and such

(When they remembered their place)

More often than not they were

Unruly mules

We tolerated them

But made sure never to spare the whip

Now their presence troubles us

Disturbing in ways we can’t quite say

They are an aside

Not fully real

Not like our kind

These half-remembered

Wailing ghosts

Begging for their existence

In the valley of the ancient

Kings

Hear our roar:

We are the masters now!

The shifting desert sands

Stretched out serpentine

Whispering:

Silence

All things shall fail in time

Exodus

What promise

Was forgotten or broken

To make us so

Forsaken?

Surely there is

A purpose to

This wild suffering

Our abandonment

Did we

Choose this

Freely?

Our wanderlust

To wander lost

In wilderness

My Lord!

Give us a holy fire

To warm

Our hearts

It’s cold living

With our only friends

The stars

Before we lived enslaved

Yet we were sometimes

Warm and full

Now we are free

Free to live

With hunger and

Uncertainty

HE WHO IS

I beg and plead

Give us a sign

Something

Something to believe

To help us see

This loss and lostness

Is necessary

Must our destiny

Be forged

In the fire and ash

Of what we flee?

I am who I am

And yet

I am nothing

On my own

Who am I?

Answer me!!!

If thou are more

Than false hope

And the silence

Between pleas

…At last

A stillness gathered

And smothered

The susurrant sands

Silence vast and heavy

Cloaked the land

And terrible nameless fear

Reached out its hand

All was dark

I could not see

I fell on stone

(Cracking my skull)

And in my head

I heard these words:

I AM

NOT A MAN

OR A PLACE

I AM THAT!

I AM

THE SPACE

BETWEEN

EACH STAR AND STEP

I AM WORD…

AND THOUGHT…

AND BREATH…

THE WANT OF WHICH

IS DEATH!

I AM FIRE

THE FIRE YOU MAKE

WHICH YOU SHALL

ALWAYS CARRY

IN YOUR HEART

AND YOUR HANDS

THAT I AM

AND YOU

YOU ARE THE LIVING THING
THAT MUST BURN

MY OFFERING

YOU ARE THE GUARDIAN

OF THE BREATH

OF LIFE

YOU CARRY WITHIN

THAT THOU ART!

I awoke

Beneath a sky

Bright and clear

No longer lost

And now I see!

The only

Holy land

Lives in me

Those falsely

Promised lands

Will always be

Out of reach

Beyond the sands

Our worth

Is held just

In these hands:

That love

All living things

That care

For each other

And tender

The earth

It is enough

(Lest it be spilled)

This Earth

Our journey together

The pain of

Being born and

Of being

A slave

Or to choose

The suffering

Of one

That struggles

To be free

It is enough

And more

I stand

A brightly burning flame

Amongst the stars:

Hineni, hineni;

I’m ready, my lord.

Footnotes

Readers will note that the poems are not really about the places (of which I have very limited knowledge) but I try to capture some of the lived experiences, motives, suffering and cruelty in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The poems are addressed to a Jewish friend because they are a member of the powerful ‘tribe’ inflicting most of the suffering on another people and because, quite frankly, I am closer to that community than the Palestinian community. However, I do not equate being Jewish with the actions of the Israeli state (as Israel tries to), nor for that matter do I equate being Israeli with supporting apartheid and genocide. Other writers can speak to and for the Palestinian people ‘from within their skin’ (their language and culture) far better than I. The poems are therefore a plea – to my Israeli and Jewish friends to hold on to their souls by honouring the shared humanity of the Palestinian people and resisting fascism in all its forms – and a lament – for all the Palestinian people ‘trapped by history’ in hell on Earth. ↩︎
All images used were created by the author using AI generative image tools. ↩︎
These poems were created and first published between April 2024-January 2025. ↩︎
With great regret, currently the only future I can see for ordinary Palestinians seems to be a coordinated humanitarian mass migration – as was the case for Jews (and others) in Nazi Germany.
The fact that many extremist Israelis and Americans would like to see such a migration, rather than cease their policy of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, is not the point when thinking of this from the perspective of civilians.
Obviously any Palestinians that do not wish to leave their homeland should be supported by us and international law and organisations, however the prospects for all Palestinians continue to look bleak when you have two nuclear superpowers (the USA and Israel) intent on alternating between slow motion ‘mowing the lawn’ and quick speed Genocide of a whole people that have no powerful State actors supporting them (as has been the case for many decades).
Many of the leaders in Israel, Palestinian occupied territories and the USA are extremists that see the Palestinian’s suffering as merely tools for their political ends (that is to say they are terrorists). We might not be able to stop them but we should not avoid calling them out for what the are whilst trying to save men, women and children being murdered like animals in their droves.
It is really quite simple, if you think killing over 40,000 women and children is justified in this case then you are the terrorist. ↩︎
Statistics on Palestinians and Israelis killed over time (since September 2000 and prior to October 07 2023 in Gaza): https://statistics.btselem.org/en/all-fatalities/by-date-of-incident?section=overall&tab=overview
Minors and children killed after January 2009 (post the the First Gaza War aka Operation Cast Lead or the Gaza Massacre) and prior to October 07 2023 (Palestinian 1076, Israeli 23):

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