Image Credit: Shelia Anonzier, spring, (2018), 7 x 9.5, watercolor on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
star of Bethlehem open in profusion with the new moon a ground cover
of small celestial flowers on this day when the faithful break their month-long fast
at long last the bones of our children have been returned to family and earth…
how could it be? almost forty years ago on this day the settler colonial state
of us bombed a neighborhood block in West Philly and cordoned off the houses
while whole families burned to death
in their homes…
fourteen year old Tree Africa
who loved to run and to climb
and pray her wings
and twelve year old Delisha
who was “always right behind
her big sister…”
on this day in the sunset moon rise of the Eid celebration the settler colonial state began again and again its aerial bombing this time of a neighborhood block in Gaza apartment buildings collapse on the families living in them and when Rian Baba! Baba! and his daughter Sarah were pulled from the rubble bloody and broken but alive
all their loved ones lay dead and buried around them
and the voice of his youngest
crawling through the flames
calling Baba! Baba!
echoes
in the silence
star of bethlehem… explosions rend the moon.. a child crawls runs climbs through the inferno in my dreams I throw my body over hers cradle her to my chest heart lungs
stamp out the flames in arms gather our kin gather our kin gather
Poet, writer, storyteller, cultural historian, interdisciplinary humanities scholar and librarian, Gale Jackson is the author ofPut Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman: Song, Dance, Black History and Poetics in Performance; MeDea A Novella; Suite for Mozambique; Bridge Suite: Narrative Poems Based on the Lives of African and African American Women in the Early History of These New Black Nations; andA Khoisan Tale of Beginnings and Ends. Her work has been performed, exhibited, presented and anthologized widely, and appears in journal publications including The African American Review; Freedomways; The Journal of Black Studies; Feminist Studies; American Voices; Callaloo; Tribes; Artist and Influence, Ploughshares and Essence. She edited the Collaborative Voice: Art in a War Time anthology (CollaborativeVoice@Goddard.edu) and co-edited Art Against Apartheid: Voices for Freedom collection. She facilitates the Ehecatl Olin Learning Studio and The Poet in the House Collaborative, with New York City middle school students, serves as a professor on the graduate faculties of interdisciplinary arts and education at Goddard College, and has been awarded an NEH fellowship for her work in griot traditions.
