Tag: Palestine

Why Don’t You Just Die? – 29th July 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 3 Comments
Bird and Boy, Rahat (1994)
The cell door opens, but no light comes through,
   just a guard's fist and a dog's snapping jaw.
Thirty-three years of this, though changing too,
   the blocks where guards once kept a fragile law.

They took the books, the mirrors, the hotplate,
   removed our blankets for a single sheet.
Toothbrushes replaced with ones short and straight,
   walking our laps without shoes on our feet.

Still touching hope when the radio plays
   Abeer Nehme for three minutes a day.
Then I feel human, despite the malaise,
   as Gaza burns a hundred miles away.

They ask,
"Why don't you just die?"
The guards sneer.

   I'm still here.
      I'm still here.
         I'm still here.

Inspired by the titular article by Nasser Abu Srour at Equator magazine about life as a Palestinian inside Israeli prisons.

“I have decided to write because things do not find existence outside the borders of language, not even genocide. I must write about the slaughter in Gaza; about its famished men, women and children; about its drowned sea and about its ability to rise again; about the world’s indifference to what has happened there and what is still happening there; about how the major powers barely even acknowledge this crime. I must write about Palestinian prisoners, because a war is still being waged against them; the Israeli prison authorities have not yet declared a ‘ceasefire’.”

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

A Cure For The Self

Through nurture and nature we form our traits
Some with negative consequences
Philosophy and all it investigates
Brings positive outcomes to all our senses

Breakfast In Gaza – 28th July 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 3 Comments 
Spoons still clatter each morning,
  amongst the rebar and dusted bread.
Idle chatter around the fallen awning,
  auntie still insists we make the bed.

But first, we must wash the dishes,
  perhaps there will be time to play.
Even knowing worse, unspoken wishes,
  it’s another day off school today

No reception from the satellite,
  let’s make do with our imagination.
This inception of al fresco light
  shall become our new foundation.

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

Check Your Privilege

Some people are sharp and others, not so much
Not everyone has the same head start as you
Be patient with those still searching, as such
Check your privilege before all that you do

Theological Alibi – 7th July 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 20 Comments

Let me show you what they assembled.

Lavender is an AI engine
that flags tens of thousands of Palestinian men for death.

The Gospel spits out more than 100 bombing targets a day—
names that once took military intelligence a full year to gather.

Where’s Daddy, the sick name of a tracker
that follows a man home,
then kills him there,
where his children are.

Twenty seconds.
Enough time for an officer to glance a target,
just long enough to see the shadow of a male.

This is not the fog of combat.
This is a factory.
Those who run it believe the land
was promised to them by God.

That is the sum that should stalk your sleep—
the slickest killing apparatus ever turned on a people,
operated by a state with a theological alibi.

The same trap is deployed against anyone who speaks up.
They tell the queer organiser:
those people would never stand with you.
They tell the feminist:
those people would never march for you.
The chorus does not shift.
Your compassion is wasted
because the dying do not echo your words.

A child should not need the correct ideology to deserve to live.

That is not a radical statement.
It used to be the floor.
The thing everyone agreed on
before we began means-testing
who deserves to live.

A child in Gaza did not script Europe’s antisemitism.
A family in Rafah did not run the death camps.

Yet they are paying the bill all the same—
in levelled streets,
in families,
in children.

Every major military on earth is studying what Israel has done in Gaza.
They are taking notes.

The manual being drafted in plain view
proves that you can kill at scale,
from a distance,
with a 20-second glance and
a holy text as a warrant,
and the world will watch and qualify and explain.

This poem is a paraphrase of an article that I failed to note the URL for but you can find information on Lavender, The Gospel and Where’s Daddy? here. It is sickening. Israel is a sick society, and for both Jews and Palestinians to remain safe, it needs to be destroyed.

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

Our Duty To Learn

Even after suffering so
Learning lights the way to go
The names and dates can be forgot
The moral lies within the plot

Mud And Sheepskin – 22nd June 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 3 Comments

With the first stones of the First Intifada,
I learned the rebuilding of my world
with thumbs in mud, not marble,
sheepskin stretched across olive tree twigs.

Brushes dabbed on UNRWA flour sacks,
ration-stamped ghosts bloom into orchards.
A boy with a door that still closes,
an olive tree outside, the settlers forgot to cut.

Art as resistance, refusing erasure,
imagination with its back to the wall,
signing its name in cracked clay and smoke,
the skies hanging from barbed wire.

Every scene is saying no
every line a road I’m not allowed to walk,
every frame a document, a moment,
steady as a heartbeat in the flour dust.

Inspired by the artists of Palestine, making the most of what they have left available to them.

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

The Definition Of Insanity

Carrying on against the grain
Hope is not a strategy
Doing the same thing again and again
The definition of insanity

The Puncturers – 11th June 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 21 Comments 
legalised punctures
the symbols of
burnt stars
branded flesh and
bloodied devices
gut percussion
a pound of flesh
punctuated
without protection

pound
   pound
      pound
those punctilios
until they come around
where bodies of evidence
may no longer be found

everything is legitimate

Shared with dVerse Poetics – unpunctuated and inspired by the (as yet unwatched) Bodies of Evidence documentary

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

Just Don’t Make Things Worse

Anger and grief only add more fuel
So stop digging that hole you’re in
Negative energy is the devil’s tool
To ensure you keep on digging

He Is Here – 3rd June 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 20 Comments

Horns no longer hidden
Pointed at yellow lines
Crossing them is forbidden
Stripped to their confines

Facing rape with guns
Exterminating daughters and sons
Behold the chosen ones

Horns are now revealed
Along with exposed tails
Evil no longer concealed
The devil is Israel’s

Shared with dVerse Quadrille #249 – horns and inspired by the actions taken by the IDF against the flotilla activists who were kidnapped in international waters while trying to bring aid to the Palestinians who are, ironically, being genocided by Israel. Sorry if you don’t like the message. I don’t like the inhumanity and I will protest through my poetry.

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

It Is Well To Be Flexible

What’s wanted may not be possible
Nor your second choice or third
It is well to be humble and flexible
To be a human being of our word

A Single Dusty Shoe – 26th April 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 2 Comments

Written for GloPoWriMo 2026 Day 25:
Write your own poem in which you use at least three metaphors for a single thing, include an exclamation, ruminate on the definition of a word, and come back in the closing line to the image or idea with which you opened the poem.

When the rains came that day
  you had to wonder why?
What had you done to deserve
  these questions from the sky?

School was quietly cancelled
  and you had to entertain
ideas to the innocent
  that you were unable to explain.

A story folded mid-sentence,
  the page torn from the first chapter;
a question…
  that will never reach an answer.

Somewhere, a plastic tricycle
  and a single dusty shoe
are waiting as a reminder
  of the happiness you knew.

It’s a goddamn genocide!
  Yet it’s constantly denied –
On its way to a holocaust
  from which you cannot hide.

No – it’s a goddamn genocide!
  One day to be repaid
By ghosts of all those glass bells broken
  when the rain returns – afraid.

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

There’s Nothing Wrong with Being Wrong

No one has ever been harmed by the truth
Only those who dwell in ignorance and deceit
Have we learned nothing since our youth?
Admitting error is not admitting defeat

Negative Space – 4th March 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 5 Comments

This write is based on the idea that Gaza and the Palestinians are not victims of hate, but because evil loves destruction, they are, in fact, the victims of love. The art metaphor was inspired by the Red Hand Files #355

Another beautiful day dawns in Gaza
as he admires his sculptures

victims of his love

Polishing rough edges
after careful, endless siege

Sulphur and ash pigments
splatter the canvas

Crushed concrete and tear gas
the rubble catches the morning sun
in negative spaces

The screams add new textures
to the palette

His meticulous love
crafting masterpieces
signed with an airstrike

His initials salt the fields

The critics gather
viewing from watchtowers
the tenderness in the demolition
the love in every line

In exhibition
his greatest work

entitled ‘Peace’

There are murmurs of great restraint
“the composition is heartbreaking”

Evil enjoys destruction
looks upon its work as art
with a curator’s pride

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

Awareness Is Freedom

No slavery is more disgraceful
Than one which is self-imposed
Is it vanity or ignorance
That is keeping your eyes closed?

Sunset On Al Dera – 29th December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 6 Comments
photo: Ibrahem Nabeel/Google Maps

I walked down the old, sandy wooden steps
to the beach
I had been here decades before
everything looked different
but the smell was the same
a salt that cleared the nose
and spits in your face
time
and time again

I remembered the flashing lights
reflected on the water
all the good cheer
the dream that this day will never end
up before the sun
patiently impatient
the horizons are soon to reveal the truth

…but
this Christmas
I wanna die
I’ve seen Satan and Jesus
in a crimson-bloodied sky
angel wings pummeling the city to dust

Shared with an AllPoetry.com contest by Bad Jonny, who gave us the italicised lines as starters. I decided to use both and link them.
30th Jan 2026 – Shared with dVerse OLN #400