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Lynda Tavakoli

Unbroken The Gaza Poems

Photo credit: Sam Tavakoli

Lynda Tavakoli

Unbroken The Gaza Poems

Live Encounters Publishing

THE GAZA POEMS

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LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Contents Dedication 02 Preface 04 Unkown 99 06 Winding Sheet 08 Pigeon Food 10 Götterdämmerung* 12 Right Of Return 14 Hardcore 16 Unbroken 18 What Is Wrong With You? 20 This Decent Life 22 Afterthought 24 Want 26 How Deep The Sorrow 28 Real Estate 30 Wcnsf 32 Haibun for Gaza 34 Acknowledgements 36

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Dedication For all those lost to genocide, particularly the children. Lynda Tavakoli

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Preface I do not find prefaces very easy to write. What do I prepare the reader for? Why did the book come into being? Who did I write the poems for? In truth, I hardly know the answer to these questions myself except to say that they have been a visceral reaction following the tragic events beginning on the 7th October ’23, and sadly still ongoing. The one thing I am certain of though, is that my world view was splintered in a way I could never have imagined and my belief in the kindness of humanity has been regularly thrashed to bits ever since. Quite simply, these poems have been the result of that mind shift and I will allow the words to speak for themselves. Each poem has been published on an individual basis over the past 18 months but I was keen to gather them together in their entirety, and in the order that they were written. By choosing to publish them in digital form my hope is that they can be accessed and shared by a wider audience. I would not have been able to do any of this without the support and guidance of Mark Ulyseas who immediately agreed to the idea of this project without hesitation or preconditions. For this I owe him a great debt because not everyone would have done the same given the subject matter of the poems.

For a long time I felt a huge reticence concerning speaking out about the genocide that was taking place in Gaza and then one day I heard someone mention a quote by the Jesuit priest and peace activist, Daniel Berrigan, ‘The difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything’.

His simple words awoke in me a determination to finally put my head above the parapet and these poems are the result. They are my small something. Lynda Tavakoli County Down Northern Ireland May 2025

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Unknown 99 There is a baby in the hospital labelled Unknown 99 like some odd, uninteresting gift relegated to the nameless list, but I will call you Little Miracle and dare to think about the who it is you might become

when time transports you to a place of cradling light, where displaced names have lost their anonymity,

where the moon can chase the stars in limpid skies, and where silence sheds its longing into sleep like melted snow.

I see you there, war’s Little Miracle, your belly full again, your heart the beating presence of a nation’s grief.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Winding Sheet There you are, wrapped inside the boundaries of war, only the short length of you to guess your age. And there, your mother waits, a stillness of grief before the unravelling. No flag tells us your story, only the merge of white on red, as layer after layer the bandages unpick, and through an opening, only big enough to place a mother’s kiss, that glimpse of who you were.

So, there you are, wrapped inside the bindings of war, now disappeared along a corridor of television news. Some things you can’t unsee In the unwrapping. Nor ever should.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Pigeon Food This morning, in the soft beauty of my garden, I fed seed to the birds. Pheasants, blue tits, robins and a single woodpecker, some long-tailed tits, a murderhood of crows, two magpies and a jackdaw chick. But no pigeons. Later, on the television news, and in that place where birdsong’s scorched mouth drones the skies in open stealth, I find where all those hungry disappeared have flown.

A peoplehood of humankind and last among the pecking-order list, they are being offered pigeon food for breakfast.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Götterdämmerung* When you say that you just can’t look Look

and rinse your eyes with hearts that fall and rise and fall until Allah finally admits their stillness into martyrdom Look

and see how suffering fails to penetrate the consciousness of a world where the umbilici are severed with stones and limbs dispensed with Gigli saws Look

and know that weed fields never feed the starved nor a coverall of PPE dispel the clenching teeth of children’s misery and that all roads lead to death Look

and wonder that enough just never seems to be enough and when we turn away we become complicit by our own abstentions. Look

*Götterdämmerung: ‘Situations of world altering destruction marked by extreme chaos and violence’

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Right Of Return In the dustbowl of his palm, a key. He knows its searing coolness on his skin, its metal imprint sewn like a tattoo into the fabric of his dreams, while the parched mouth of a lock screams in a door somewhere in the past, waiting for a homecoming, waiting for a miracle.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Hardcore Children lick plastic bags like lollipops, tongues stretched into corners, tastebuds alert for the tang of a honeyed moon while trucks carry cargo to the sea, a stew of rubble and bones, and foundation for a too-late promise built upon the splintered remains of the disappeared.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Unbroken For Gaza You may think you have silenced us, but the voices of our forefathers still sing along the sheared streets of your destruction.

You may think you have orphaned us, but every soul owns its paradise and every loss still breathes in those who are left behind.

You may think you have famished us, but our stripped bones will one day permeate the soil, nurturing the promise of new beginnings. You may think you have demolished us, but even the crush of what remains can learn to be again its own foundation and a country reborn. You may think you have buried us, but we will ghost your consciousness in the small hours of your sleeping, haunting all of your imaginings. You may think you have broken us, but we are stronger than you know. Stronger because of you. Stronger, despite you.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

What Is Wrong With You? When you sleep, do you think of them in your dreams? I do wonder about that. And I think it must be easier to partner the devil than to sift through lies that burn and scald and break the rest of us. I pity you.

For while the rising souls of Gazan dead find peace in martyrdom, you will face the sentence of your own deliverer; past deeds forever rotting in an unforgiving coffin of your inhumanity.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

This Decent Life My pheasants have a life, a decent life, their thirsts satisfied with a single swallow, their hunger soothed by offerings of easy kindliness. Easy kindliness, and the knowing that decency does not always afford safe passage, even for a simple bird. Her shredded body lay on the field, a spill of fresh silage sprinkled over her like buckshot a foot missing, innards laid bare by the cut of the blades and a freckling of feathers peeled from their pink bones still warm as she was lifted.

I buried the pieces of her in a place her friends might know, her lost presence new to them in the aftermath. A decent burial. But what to say about so small a thing, these words about a bird and not a bird no solace to the left behind, no succour to the suffering, no answer to the never-ending pain of war.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Afterthought Tell the displaced they will find a home, if they do not die while walking. Tell the maimed that in five years’ time they will have learned to crawl again.

Tell the buried they will only live inside the beating hearts of those remaining.

Tell the orphaned that the sympathy of others will never heal their loneliness. Tell the abandoned they may one day be remembered for their fortitude. Tell the starved that skin and bone has satisfied its own hyperbole.

Tell the missing they are simply numbers now, lost within the ether of statistics and conveniency.

Tell the children you have not forgotten them when their images have ceased to occupy our TV screens. Tell whoever wants to listen that the world is surely lost if the dead are but an afterthought.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Want A silence of drones finds solace in an empty sky, and below, hope.

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Lynda Tavakoli

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

How Deep The Sorrow (title borrowed from Hind Khoudary, Al Jazeera reporter) Waiting for the miracle that never came and around them the silence the silence the silence

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Credit: Mark Ulyseas

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Real Estate there’s this place beautiful

phenomenal location on the sea best weather everything’s good

some fantastic things could be done with it fantastic things rebuilt in a different way beautiful just wait and see

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Wcnsf wounded child no surviving family eyes unshuttered like a stare of owls they swallow the dark with parched tongues their identities inked on the surface of skin as signatures for posterity Noor (Light) Khalid (Eternal) Layla (Night) Nasir (Protector) asleep upon the hands of dead mothers they remember the before when touch was a cradle of belonging and the after a bloom of stars in paradise Aziza (Beloved) Amal (Hope) Farrah (Joy) Asad (Lion)

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

their silence shields them for who can know the slash of shredded limbs exported from a screen or the weep of crusting flesh from what remained of what remained Nasir (Protector) Safiya (Pure) Dahir (Victorious) Bashir (Bringer of good news) gathering of the unclaimed these children of ghosts exhuming the darkness for what was lost to them these ghosts of children nothing now to own but our humanity Habiba (Beloved)

Iman (Faith)

Hamid (Praiseworthy)

Zara (Flower) Lina (Tender)

THE GAZA POEMS

Photo Lynda Tavakoli

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Haibun for Gaza Would it matter what I told you? If I said that my sister’s warm cheek presses into my own cheek like a kiss, the blood from her wounds leaking into my mouth as hot as a river of fire? Or how it feels to already know that her softening weight was what protected me? Or if somewhere beyond this choking darkness the voice of our father ricochets through the rubble as he hunts for our collective breaths? Would it actually matter? I call out, Baba, Baba, into the bruised space of my mouth, but the sound is seeped within itself, lost to my own consciousness and the growing stickiness of my sister’s skin. Yet I think, here I am safe. Safer than in the space above that is the most dangerous place on earth to be a child, and where our father is grinding his fingers into dust. So, even in this hell where my sister has found her own paradise, I am thankful. And Allah is merciful. He has removed from my ears the drill of the drones and the threat they have carried all the hours of all the days since the beginning. There is a kind of comfort in this unfamiliar quiet and I close my eyes to it, welcoming its finality, but knowing too, the suffering my own death will cause. So, I breathe and pray, my fingertips touching in a bridge of prayer inside this small mosque of air where I am waiting now, only to be unearthed. a mote of light in the dust of our despair illuminates the dark

THE GAZA POEMS

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

Acknowledgments 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’. Colin Dardis at Poetry NI, for considering my work and choosing WCNSF for his Poem Alone blogspot.

Central Bylines who have featured several of these poems in their poetry section. … and to those who have taken the time to read these poems on social media and been thoughtful enough to offer messages of public support. It is something I truly appreciate because it is not always an easy thing to do these days.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where she facilitates adult creative writing classes and has 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 Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. A poet and novelist, Lynda’s work has been published worldwide with Farsi and Spanish translations.

She has been winner of a number of international poetry and short story awards and been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Galway Review, Skylight47, Abridged, CAP Seamus Heaney Anthologies, Eat the Storms, Drawn to the Light Press, amongst many others. Lynda Tavakoli’s debut poetry collection, The Boiling Point for Jam received wide acclaim for its raw honesty and authenticity while her second collection A Unison of Breaths has been recently published by Arlen House. Cover image: Death in the Afternoon, photograph by Mark Ulyseas. Designed and produced by Live Encounters Publishing https://liveencounters.net Email: editor@liveencounters.net