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Lynda Tavakoli Speaking To A Blind World The Gaza Poems (2)

Photo credit: Sam Tavakoli.

Lynda Tavakoli

Speaking To A Blind World The Gaza Poems (2)

Live Encounters Publishing

T H E G A Z A P O E M S (2)

No part of this publication may be reporduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the author and publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Cover image: Mosque window, photograph by Lynda Tavakoli.

Designed and produced by Live Encounters Publishing https://liveencounters.net Email: editor@liveencounters.net

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Contents Dedication 02 Preface 04 Speaking To A Blind World 06 His Mother’s Hand 08 Bait 10 Mowing The Lawn 12 A Child Asks 14 In This Sorry Excuse Of A World... 16 The Colour Of Ash 18 Graveyard of The Living 20 A Bomb Basks In A Living Room 22 Haibun 24 So Much Wasted Good 26 Acknowledgements 28

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Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Dedication For the journalists and media workers who have lost their lives or been injured in Gaza and the West Bank. Lynda Tavakoli

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Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Preface

did not think that I would still be writing poetry about Gaza today, given that I thought life for the Palestinians could not get any worse and I had already contributed the little I could with a few meagre words written on some pages. I am therefore deeply saddened that in fact, the situation has continued to get worse and the present suffering endures into yet another year with little indication of betterment.

In the meantime, I carry on writing my poems, and in a modest way using social media to draw attention to the ongoing genocide and injustices being perpetrated in plain sight. Sadly, this has sometimes been at a personal cost that I won’t expand upon here. Suffice to say that I am unashamed of my stance in believing that all human beings, regardless of ethnicity etcetera, deserve to be treated with decency, respect, and most of all, without abject cruelty. With all the chaos happening in the world at present, and according to some, the so-called ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza labelled a ‘success’, the eyes of the public have again been shuttered and silence dominates the world headlines regarding Gaza’s ongoing misery. Winter storms continue their onslaught on displacement camps as rats run freely through what is left of totally inadequate living conditions, and humanitarian aid is still being prevented from entering the country en masse.

I am conscious that a weariness has set in regarding the plight of Palestinians, and the fact that other world events have begun to supersede what is still happening in Gaza. In many ways this is understandable given that human nature often dictates our inclination not to be brought down by negativity and pessimism. But we must not let Gaza fade from our consciousness even if our voices are small and indistinct at times, for they do matter if only to prove that goodness can still prevail often against all the odds. Lynda Tavakoli County Down Northern Ireland January 2026

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Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Speaking To A Blind World see the ragdoll children

those stillborn foals of war charred black by birthings of fire

and see them slide between the hands of their redeemers slipping through practised fingers among the clean up I need to acknowledge it this human road kill this abomination

this reminder of what we are witness to

when silence itself remains blind to its own truth

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Contemplation. Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

His Mother’s Hand For photojournalist Abdel Raheem Khader On paper, his list is forty people long, a family reach of names he had one day pencilled on the page but now become a grisly hundred metre washing line of war. He wants to tell you of his need to find their bodies whole, to hug them, bury them, say a last goodbye to them, for only this, he thinks, can offer comfort to his pain.

Near a neighbour’s door he finds her hand his mother’s hand, the fingers gently curled like an unfolding blossom of a smothered rose that seeks the light.

He will plant its message in that boneyard of despair where only hope must grow that place where limb to limb, his peoples merge again in wholeness incomplete, and for the present, it must be enough.

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Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Bait

He left for food a bag of flour -

and because he could not run like others ran, he returned to them, a bagful now, of something else.

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Beyond the lawn glows the Light. Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Mowing The Lawn When you finish ‘mowing the lawn’ what then? Do you not know that underneath your feet the souls of the already gone are biding time before the reckoning? For however harsh the scythe, the seeds of history cannot cede their past and will emerge again in that garden of rebirth where only truth can grow and the sins of the wicked await the retribution of the innocent.

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The 2025 World Press Photo of the Year Award depicts Mahmoud Ajjour, nine, who was injured during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024 [Credit: © Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/17/portrait-ofamputee-palestinian-boy-from-gaza-wins-world-press-photo-award

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

A Child Asks when will my arm grow back? oh sapling child see the mighty oak weep in winter storms its taken limbs a shrapnelled sward of absence underfoot but see again that sapping trunk to know that even in its starkness there remains a life sustained

and shaped forever not by what was stolen but by what survives a fierce unyielding testament to the cruelty of loss

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Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

In This Sorry Excuse Of A World … I wish you days that birth with the hum of silenced skies,

and nights when dreams are soughed by a desert’s healing wind, and hands that know the joyful touch of skin on living skin,

and homes where sleep rests softly on the foreheads of your children,

and breath that pleats itself with hope between the sheets of your rebirth,

and most of all I wish for your forgiving heart, that wishbone of our lost humanity.

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This aerial view shows displaced Palestinians returning to the war-devastated Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on 19 January 2025, shortly before a ceasefire deal was implemented. Credit: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP. https://www.ifj.org/

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

The Colour Of Ash Her streets may wear your uniform of war, but the colour of ash is not Gaza, the colour of ash will always be you.

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Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Graveyard Of The Living Tents stand choked between tombstones, cold slabs a strange solace for the living with eyes fixed to Mecca, souls already cradled in the afterlife. Here, desperation finds a final space for the displaced as families pitch homes amongst the already dead, and heaven echoes only with a vacancy of stars. Here, children rest their cheeks upon the laps of sleep to dream of rooms where once a curvature of letters draped themselves like cantilevers on the page and learning threaded tapestries through eager veins.

Yet now the teachings in this place are merely carved on flattened stone, the names a soundless witness to an unknown fate, beholding nothing more than decades made of promises that died with every crashing wave upon poor Gaza’s stolen shores.

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Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

A Bomb Basks In A Living Room I remember once, a bomb blew up the innards of our town a mile or so from where we lived. I’d been sitting in our living room and watching telly with the family, the evening news, as usual, blasting out the hottest stories of the day on Belfast streets, when suddenly six hundred pounds of hatred made its own arrival to our relatively peaceful lives. Next morning daddy took us down to see the aftermath and to wisely keep his counsel to himself, for gentleness was his tool of war and nothing else.

In Mr Muin Al-Hatto’s Gaza city home an unexploded ornament of war lies beached inside his living room. With the sleekness of a shark it stretches its two thousand pounds of ill intent across the rubbled floor, a slumbering timebomb with a name: Mark84/Mod4 – 2000 lbs, writ large upon its mottled skin. I wonder what a father thinks when every substitute for shelter offers up its same bleak consequence. Better then to live or die amongst the dregs of home, and recognise their truth in all its particles of enforced misery.

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Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

HAIBUN this is not your child this is the child of someone else’s suffering

The beginning of winter and a child burrows her small body into the chilling cage of her brother’s brittle ribs. She hears the faint crackle of marrow within his bones soughing from under his vest, beneath the sodden wetness of a jacket their father left behind. Rain still drenches through the plastic walls and roof of their tent, saturating a mattress that absorbs any comfort in their sibling embrace. This is their world. And tomorrow that other world has already forgotten. once upon a time when children sloshed in puddles there was only joy

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Heart of Stone. Photo Credit: Sam Tavakoli.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

So Much Wasted Good In his sickness someone tells him there will be a tomorrow for those others, that beyond their raw-boned wasting there are skeletons they must still call hope. Yet, one more year ebbs as a world moulders in its own self-interest, knowing that the saddest truth is just how much good he could have done, and didn’t.

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LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Acknowledgments I owe my sincere gratitude to:

Mark Ulyseas for his unflinching support and faith in my work.

Strider Marcus Jones and The Lothlorien Poetry Journal for publishing some of these poems from the outset when he could so easily have said no. Alan Hayes, publisher of Arlen House, who has included a number of these poems in my second collection ‘A Unison of Breaths’.

Central Bylines who have featured several of these poems in their poetry section.

… and to those who have already taken the time to read these poems on social media and been thoughtful and kind enough to offer messages of public support. It is something I truly appreciate because it is not, by any means, an easy thing to do these days.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland where she has facilitated adult creative writing classes for a number of years and worked as a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools.

She is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and has been nominated for both the Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. A poet and novelist, Lynda’s work has been published worldwide with Farsi, Spanish and Arabic translations.

She has won a number of international poetry and short story awards and been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Live Encounters Magazine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Galway Review, Skylight47, Abridged, CAP Seamus Heaney Anthologies, Eat the Storms, Drawn to the Light Press, amongst many others.

Lynda’s debut poetry collection, The Boiling Point for Jam received wide acclaim for its raw honesty and authenticity while her latest collection A Unison of Breaths has been published by Arlen House.

Cover image: Mosque window, photograph by Lynda Tavakoli. Designed and produced by Live Encounters Publishing https://liveencounters.net Email: editor@liveencounters.net © Lynda Tavakoli