Ode to the Young Doctor in Gaza

And other poems

Christine E. Black

Ode to the Young Doctor in Gaza

To the Muslim doctor in Gaza,
his soft, dark eyes, gloved hands
gently placed on a dusty, bloodied
Palestinian child, with matted hair,
who is screaming.
To his colleague behind him in a white coat,
waiting to assist. The young doctor
may be from Jordan or Lebanon,
his mother’s pride for his medical school
honors from Bahrain or Egypt or Dubai.
The child’s screams burrow
into his chest, remain there hours,
shouts, wailing, weeping
around him. His gaze steadies.
Is the arm broken, the small arm?
His work, assessing, washing,
Splinting, wrapping bandages,
goes on. What luxury do we have
when such screaming overwhelms us,
and we turn away?
This man may be only two hours
into his shift. Does he pray
with his whole body five times a day,
his sides brushing against the warmth
of his brothers, praying with millions,
all facing in unison? Are there Friday
prayers in Gaza? Is the mosque broken
to rubble? Or does he pray in a small room
behind a scattering of bloody rags?
And when will there be a break to eat?

Gaza

My plan is to go to the place
at the edge of the world.
I show the man speaking Arabic
behind the counter at the airport
my ticket with the red numbers.
All other places
have been crossed out.
Yes, I say, I want to go there
to see, to see the children
who say they want to die
if their mother does.
I remember them
from dreams of
earth’s saddest songs.
The oldest, a boy,
who is maybe five
says they want to go also
if a bomb takes her,
a bomb from the sky
above their prison
of a past war
that never ended.
To the children
and to their mother,
I must now take
pears and almonds, water;
picture books to read aloud.
I will gather them on my lap,
while their mother rests,
smell their hair
of smoke and fear.

Peace Meetings

At peace meetings, I found men, mostly old –
from WWII, Vietnam, the Korean War. Ken brings his projector

and runs the equipment. He recalls the year he married his first wife,
the same year he was radicalized, he says, when Nixon ordered

the invasion of Cambodia. James lost his job teaching English and history
when he opposed the Vietnam War. He read the Bible

by flashlight as a teenager and now tells me outlandish stories from it:
how in Deuteronomy, chapter 12, a couple of pages after the Ten Commandments

he found divine instructions for a man to devour all nations the Lord your God
is giving over to you and if among the captured, you find a comely woman

to your liking, you may marry her – take her into your house, have her shave her head,
pare her nails, discard the clothes she wore when captured;

let her mourn her parents for one month, then you may have sex with her.
Also, my friend read histories of WWII, of how Roosevelt turned away Jews

from Nazi Germany, how we might’ve stopped Pearl Harbor.
Companies melted steel into planes and bombs,

birthing them like their favorite sons. I met Bernard, a WWII veteran,
at a Hiroshima Nagasaki Remembrance event. In the downtown heat,

we studied placards with pictures of charred bodies, frozen in forever flame,
children with tumors swelling grotesque from their small bodies.

At the boots display for dead Iraq War soldiers, I met Vietnam vets,
who long ago risked sneers of contempt as they broke codes of macho silence

to tell what was much more dangerous than any muscular myth.
They teach me, answer my questions. What was the real story, I ask,

not the one Mr. Harper droned about in high school that I wasn’t
listening to anyway, not the ones governments paid for, but the real ones, of the losers,

the conquered, the one about who wrote the check and who got paid?
These men let me ask, send me articles and book titles. A willing daughter,

A sister, I imagine them as fathers, brothers. In the Vietnam Vets Against the War
newsletter I read of how Vietnam vets guarded Iraq War vets as they spoke

at the Winter Soldier Hearings about what they saw and did.
Elder men protected younger when they told the truth,

they stood to absorb shouts or insults or do whatever may be needed,
to stop them from crushing myths

with their simple words that afternoon. I, too, with simple words, crush myths
because they scare me with their gleam and roar, their curtain-whipping deception,

their blink and flash of abstract words with spells cast as we follow them
out to the road’s edge, keep following them, even as the boy in the VA hospital

with cuts all over his bald head from IEDs forgets his name but begs
to go back to fight, to help his friends, even as the bulldozers raze the home

of the howling children as they and their mother watch. Then we wonder
how it all happened. Men at this peace meeting, wearied of myths

long out-used, have seen what it’s like. They speak and still try
to figure out what to do before it’s too late.

Jim knows how close we are to destruction after fighting in Korea,
after his 38 years at the Pentagon, after his wife’s death from cancer.

His hands tremble with Parkinson’s. He lives with his daughter now
and gets mailings from the FCNL, the Quakers.

We watch a movie about Gaza and the West Bank,
talk and listen on a Sunday night.

Christine E. Black’s poetry has been published in Antietam Review, 13th Moon, American Journal of Poetry, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod International, Red Rock Review, The Virginia Journal of Education, Friends Journal, The Veteran, Sojourners Magazine, Iris Magazine, English Journal, Amethyst Review, St. Katherine Review, Dappled Things and other publications.