The Blood of Brown Children On White Sheets and Starched Shirts
by G.A. Kleiner
It is smeared on your pale hands
and your starched white shirts,
Blinken and Biden,
the two of you still alive,
working in a white house, also splattered,
while eight thousand are dead,
bled out, wrapped up in white sheets,
buried beneath grey rubble,
bombed by your U.S.-supplied weapons.
You tout the trickle of aid trucks,
claim the targets are merely military,
tweet that every civilian life is “equally valuable,”
and cast doubt on the death toll,
while grieving mothers in Gaza cry out for clean water,
newborns die in incubators without electricity,
and toddlers are pulled from collapsed buildings
in chunks of crushed bone and torn flesh.
You have two young children, Antony Blinken!
And you, Joe Biden, lost your first wife, Nielia,
along with your one-year-old daughter, Naomi,
in a car crash a week before Christmas,
and your son Beau to brain cancer at forty-six!
So how can it be that you are both apparently okay
knowing three thousand three hundred children
have been killed in Gaza so far,
and another one dies every ten minutes?
Have you never visited people
who have barely enough to survive?
Never shared a meal with a family
whose home is a tiny fraction
of your 6,000-square-foot mansions?
Can you not imagine what it’s like to live
on a fenced-in strip of flat land
a mere five miles wide and twenty-five long
and never be allowed to leave?
Do you know that young adults
who have lived their entire lives on that strip
and are now in their thirties
have never seen a mountain?
Imagine that the next time you swallow
in your starched white shirts and ties
and talk about “the other team,”
as if this is some sort of sport.
How can you support the incessant killing
of mothers and fathers and grandparents
who have nothing to do
with the horror Hamas inflicted
on other innocent children?
Like all parents, these people want only
to laugh and love their kids,
live in a dry home with glass windows
through which they can see the sun and stars.
Have you not seen the blood-stained children crying
and calling out for their lost parents?
What if these were your children, your grandchildren?
Tell me, how can you sleep at night,
knowing your insane stance ensures
the bombs will keep bursting
homes and hospitals and humans,
day-in and night-out?
How do you look at yourself
in the mirror each morning-after
and not see the red splatters and pink smears
on your cheeks and chin and chest –
some of it still sticky and glistening,
as you motor your way to work,
another day,
another dollar,
another hundred and fifty children,
no different from yours, dead?