British Writers In Support of Palestine

Rockets are the jokes of the weak
Palestinian saying

The jokes land in ploughed fields
or bash into a wall or two.
Laughing so hard killed one soldier
in a year and wounded several civilians.
Still, fun in the wheat,
whistling over a closed border,
a blockade and a siege to boot,
we were not amused.

Finally we couldn’t resist.
Unable to stifle our own
more democratic laughter,
and ever eager to impart our
more civilized sense of fun,
we ran a hilarious sitcom
over three weeks
for 1400 Gazans.

What a show!
They fell over laughing.
They crawled, howling. No surprise.
We have perfect timing, delivery,
state of the art material.
See what happens to clumsy jokes
about the birth town
of the Minister of Defence.

Judith Kazantzis

8th March 2009

Happy International Women’s Day
to the women of Gaza
from the international community.

Sorry we have been unable to take your call
Sorry you have been held in a queue
Your call is important to us.
Press one for the usual disillusion
two for a no state final solution
Press nought for nothing, nada,
zero, zilch, absolutely jack shit and sweet fuck all

Hold for an operator. Hello. Hello? Hello?

Frankie Green

How to Settle

Get a title deed from God,
and a blank cheque from your sponsors.
It also helps to bully the U.N.
Lie. Build. Kill.
Build, build, build.

Ignore that shape at the corner of your eye.
Like a man on a planet with twin suns
you have a double shadow.
One thrown down on the hot hard road
built by the army purely for you,
the second lying faint on the grass behind you.
Watch as you pause on a hilltop,
overlooking your conquest:
here comes the Other,
whose invisibility lets you be seen.
His silence gives you speech.

Here, where your every presence marks
an absence, this land is haunted
by the woman always thinking
of this valley, this field, the ruins
of this house, whose door is remembered
only by the flesh of cactus
and she whose olive trees you harvest,
who follows you, clasping a ghostly key,
whispering in your ear, louder and louder:
my place, my place.

Carry on ignoring them. Of course you belong
God has given you the nuclear bomb to prove it.

Frankie Green

Judith Kazantzis is a poet, novelist and activist based in East Sussex. Frankie Green is a writer, musician and activist living in Kent.