POLITICAL Poem: The Price, by Steve Gerson

Off to the left, not fifty meters
from the bunker busting bomb site,
they protruded from the Gaza dust,
tank track treads bisecting them like
scalpel-sliced, surgically impaled remnants.
The arm seemed to be that of a child,
perhaps due to what appeared to be
a cartoon-charactered image still
visible on what might have been a
shirt, but rags rarely tell stories clearly.
The head wears a bloodied cap,
maybe Kippah, maybe Taqiyah,
but religion disappears under
rubbish and wounds take precedence
over Torah or Koran like angry pages torn.
The leg, a stump of a hump of flesh,
torn and raw, red and ragged, toes
blackening, might have been a man’s,
but who knows what gender becomes
when bodies are insulted by the cost of war.

Author: poetryfest

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