This piece was written by Emily Fraser, a 40-year-old writer, singer, musician and volunteer member of Clydesider Magazine, Scotland. She wrote the poem in her car, just after hearing over the radio the horrifying and tragic story of young Alma’s loss of her whole family in the Israeli army’s genocidal bombing of civilians in Gaza.
Emily Fraser / Clydesider Magazine
Seeking to express the feelings of rage, powerlessness and despair which had built up since October 2023, these words –as Emily explains– “flowed out through floods of tears in the supermarket car park on a rainy night”.
Emily lives with her partner Max and their rabbit Diego and they pray each day for the people of Palestine to be free and to live in peace.
Unholy hell
Twelve year old Alma
The Gazan girl
Now an orphan, one of thousands
Whole family killed
I should say, murdered, by IDF bombs
Including the baby, just 18 months
Alma rescued from the rubble
last December
“Bravo Alma,” they told her “now try to remember.
Where is your family?”
“Mother is there,
and my brother is over there.
I hoped my little brother would survive,”
Alma said.
“I was calling out to him
so he wouldn’t be frightened,
put then I found him, dead,
under the rubble
in a terrible state, his head severed.”
Her baby brother’s head
blown off by explosions
What a sickening,
disturbed, haunting sight
for any twelve year old
For any human, what a plight
Blast-torn bits of bodies
Dead babies, hands, feet, organs, heads
Blood and shit and plaster dust,
And then
YOUR little brother
YOUR mother, YOUR life
Ripped from under you,
Rained on top of you
Lost in senseless strife
For power, control,
Politics, ego
Survival of the fittest?
No
This conflict didn’t start in October
It began long ago, when the human race was young
We can’t trust our leaders to do
the right thing
It’s all just a big club that we ain’t in
The rich men enabling this war
fill their banks
It’s the rest of us left squabbling
And facing down tanks
“Divide and rule” tactics are alive and well
Mark your territory – “stop the boats” –
Fleet Street has papers to sell
You can gather, protest, march and sing
Or hesitate, critique, ignore the whole thing
But next time it really could be your brother
If we can’t evolve and fight harder
to LOVE one another
This capitalist cancer feeds on enmity
Like falling hair, we lose more and more humanity
Follow the dollar –
you’ll find a prime example not too far
Now a billionaire tech bro
unironically sells you
democracy, in the dark
of a rainforest dying
for its namesake corporation
In this insanity we call society
Use your imagination
what’s going to finally change this game?
I feel
the whole world should be dying of shame
I am
Cos Mars is not the answer
We’ve helped these ‘self-made’ CEOs sow
daddy’s dirty diamond seed money, but
we’re left here to watch the rot grow
in the empty melon musk of this,
our trademarked, green-washed hell
on Earth. I wonder, how and when
can we all
just stop buying extinction
and rebel?
Alma means world or soul
– I looked it up
So, World Soul,
In young Alma’s horror I can’t help
hearing our many gods speaking
in your sole voice
It’s only ever one voice, saying
“Love. Connect.”
I’m not a mother, yet I feel
more deeply for these children
than some parents in politics seem to
Now Gaza’s orphans are suicidal as well
I’m praying, praying, for it to end
Because I don’t know what else to do
They would die to escape this unholy hell
I whisper, “I’m so sorry Alma,
somehow I’ve failed you, too” .
(By Em Fraser, March 2024, West of Scotland)
(Photos: Pixabay)
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