Content Warning: Violence, murder, graphic descriptions of death, deaths of children. Please be advised and take care of yourselves.
The Workers’ Muse, No. 2
Editor’s Note: The Workers’ Muse is a new column featuring poetry by Wobblies.
On January 29, 2024 a five-and-a-half-year-old girl named Hind Rajab was murdered in the Tel al Hawa district of Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Hind, her aunt, her uncle, and three cousins were fleeing in an automobile which was targeted by an Israeli tank. Her fifteen year old cousin Layan Hamala phoned the Palestine Red Crescent Society and was shot dead by a nearby tank during the phone call. An ambulance was sent to the site with permission given by the Israeli military who, nonetheless, bombed the ambulance killing two paramedics. Hind, wounded and pleading for help, spent over three hours on the telephone before the line went out of service.
Twelve days later the car was found destroyed with all of its inhabitants dead. According to later forensic analysis, 335 bullets were fired at the car. Some of the corpses had apparently begun to decompose.
According to Save the Children International, thousands of Palestinian children have been murdered by the IDF; some as young as five and six years of age were shot in the head by snipers, others tortured, others buried in mass graves.
One is reminded of an infamous massacre from American history: the well known Ludlow massacre of April 20, 1914 when private guards hired by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company assisted by the Colorado National Guard attacked a tent colony of 1200 striking coal miners (members of the United Mine Workers of America) and their families, riddling the camp with machine-gun fire and burning it to the ground. Twelve children and two women were killed…some shot, others burned alive!
Like the IDF, the perpetrators of this crime were never prosecuted or held accountable for their actions. This is just one more example of defenseless working people, trapped in their living quarters, shot down en masse by an industrial army.
Is there a more heinous crime than the murder of children?
The attached poem is dedicated to Hind Rajab; her family and friends; and to the parents of murdered children everywhere. May they be at peace!
Hind Rajab
( In Memoriam)
And now I know what death means: a black haired angel,
cloaked with the night,
settled beside you, poor child,
but out of sight.
With a killer’s grin
he offered no comfort, nor cleansed any sin as you died there alone
and not even the moan
of tired gods
can raise a shattered body
from the dead.
And now I know what death means: a small girl’s screams
reverberating past silence
like broken bells on the hard floor of purgatory. No gates of salvation
were gently pushed aside.
No soothing hand
assuaged the bludgeoning shock.
Only a shared prison
with others that had died.
while hate filled soldiers
stood around to mock!
And now I know what death means: the woeful song
of a mother’s sorrow
knowing well
that every lost tomorrow,
one more child has disappeared,
never to know
the bloom of age,
and what was most feared:
the scourge of hell
has come to show
the ugliness of ignorance and rage.
And now I know what death means: for innocence also died,
forsaken,
on that terrible day!
Can those who cried
for what was taken,
or dared to pray
to hungry ghosts
or the unhearing stones
know
who will cradle
a dead child’s bones?
For now, truly, I know what death means: as indifferent earth
covers
even the taste of love.