Chaïm Soutine, Le poulet plumé /Plucked Chicken (1925), Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris
A hundred years from now,
if anything human still transpires then,
the IDF will be recalled in the same breath,
I suspect, as the Waffen SS.
Some may call this comparison obscene.
I call obscene the video on Instagram
showing a man holding a toddler with no head,
whose name, to which he would have answered in his toddler's way, was Ahmad—which means "Most Praiseworthy."
The bomb that killed him killed
his mother too—mercifully,
you might with a shudder think.
His father and two brothers lived
—the bomb droppers’ targeting,
it seems, was a little bit off that day.
Yes, this poem is obscene, too, I confess.
As any poem would necessarily be that evoked, for instance, Auschwitz and Babi Yar.
The one thing even more obscene, though,
is to pass over such things in silence.
For silence, don't they reckon, is consent?
See Anahid Nersessian, "Speaking the Unspeakable," review of [...] by Fady Joudah, New York Review of Books, October 17, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/10/17/speaking-the-unspeakable-fady-joudah/