I would write to you of cranes dancing in the snows of Hokkaido, but fathers are bleeding in the flour of Al-Kuwaiti roundabout. A different dance of reds and whites. The cranes gather in groups, so do the fathers and brothers and uncles in Gaza in the late hours of the night, moving through the dark in search of flour, a search that has now become a daily “Flour Massacre”.
Have you seen the emaciated face of Yazan Kafarneh? Did you see it before he died, when his family was begging for aid? Have you seen the memes they make of it in Israel, the joke they make of a boy they have starved?
Have you seen the bodies?
Have you been watching familiar faces grow thinner, every night their final post from the Holy Land being: this may be my last post, have you been watching? Have you seen? Have you been watching?
Has your outrage found its way to your voice? Has your moral indignation found its way to action?
Have you seen this man, this old man, lying in a hospital bed, his most prominent features now every bone in his body as they poke through his famished flesh? Have you seen him performing ablutions with no water, lying in what will surely be his deathbed? Have you seen that even as his life is fading his limbs are animated by devotion (an honor we do not afford any follower of his faith, the possession of devotion), animated by the grace of true devotion, true surrender?
I would write to you of bees and the hope of spring, I would write to you of the light on an abandoned palace and its crumbling elegance, or the birds singing in the gardens of Santo Amaro, but all I can hear are the drones and the wordless voices of my brothers and sisters as they call for brothers and sisters trapped beneath the rubble, their keening falling on the deaf ears of decadent empires. I would write to you of cranes dancing in the snows of Hokkaido, of their ancient and complicated choreographies, but all I can see is the dance of missing limbs—the dance of international alliances—the charade of international law.
