Upon Hearing This Isn’t Love

This should be a

love poem nowadays.

Don’t let anyone

tell you otherwise.

There’s surely hearts involved

throughout the stanzas

on genocide—

what greater flood of love

exists

when a family’s been

put to death—

by a drone

that callously hovers

once your baby

has been bled?

There isn’t even a

chance

to sing your grief—

when funerals

run for cover

before the dusk,

when the Gazans that were

are not—met with just a

shrugging of the shoulders.

If it’s you who’ve shrugged,

write a sonnet

on the mother

with no arms,

unable to carry the

daughter who’s been shred.

Say she’s never

felt amour,

that the husband

who tried his best

is simply asleep

beneath the walls.

Call this didactic

drivel, that the photo

from their wedding

isn’t worth the time of day,

the son now-wrapped

in shrapnel,

who’s excluded

from the rhythm of the page,

the dog

in a hundred pieces

around your feet—

that it will be

the lucky one I say,

will never have a clue

its human starves,

one who’s covered in chalk

around the block,

who stared at the sky

when the birds flew

for their lives,

thinking there’s a poem

which needs to soar

out into the

world,

scrawled with the

crimson colour

that’s been leaking

from his finger,

like the black

of a fountain pen,

rendered on his stomach

like a fan at a football

game:

from the river

to the sea

we will be free

Someday limping

hand-in-hand

with a Jewish girl,

that nothing else

will matter

but how they feel,

like a Capulet

or a Montague

of old, kneeling

side-by-side

at the family grave,

kissing

its every stone,

while you tell me once

again this isn’t love.

Andreas Gripp

November 22, 2024

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