That saturday just as I was about to go out
I knew something had happened already so
half-way round the crazy world at Gaza Strip
the first reports just coming in of October 7
but I said nothing about it yet at Peace Vigil
until after it had ended because I knew, knew
nothing for fact and also how maxi most big
a shit storm would then immediately ensue

I really wasn’t surprised in any way at all that
the Palestinians/ Hamas were responding full
force to what had already been this record year
of settler pogroms on series of W. Bank villages
and there was this heavy toll of what happened
when the March of Return was put down hard
when live sniper fire killed hundreds, thousands
disabled for life and ever so strategically maimed

In limbs arms and legs some even head injured
blinded while the Al Aqsa Mosque the 3rd most
holy place of Islam where like Elijah the prophet
Mohammed is believed to have ascended right up
into heaven having completed his earthly mission
of the peace which seems so far away in modern
time from navel of holy land of sectarian strife
masking all this colonial overreach stretched out

To mirror the ecological overreach that we see
underfoot and way overhead and so all around
stripping away our footing to propel us falling
and crashing down upon us threaten to drown
us in the Big Burp that could be the Last Gasp
open ocean absorbing the heat the shining ice
once reflected back out into outer space tropic
forest dwindling into annual millennial drought

That emits not sequesters our excess of carbon
permafrost releasing methane that was stored
for ice ages of time until suddenly here we are
all our precious high-falutin’ colonial dancing
cards of people with faces tight-rope walking
those mandated borders with racialized ethnic
boundaries made less and less any kind of sense
on our so common spinning earthly only home.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.