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What words can show the sorrow of a lone child
Sobbing over his dead mother’s corpse?
None can, for suffering is beyond language    
 
What words can express the distress of an old man
Who just lost his house, his kinfolk and friends?
None can, for anguish is indescribable 

What words can depict the grief–convulsed face of a mother
Gaping at her four kids lying lifeless on the ground?
None can, for wretchedness is inexpressible
 
What words can evoke the terror
Of four famished, wounded boys
Stuck in the gloom of a room
Four days long
Beside the festering corpses
Of their four mothers
And two headless relatives of theirs?
None can, for the face of horror is beyond words
 
What words can convey the wordless woe of a baby
In the midst of corpses sucking its dead mother’s toe?
None can, for sorrow defies utterances
 
What words can conjure up the ache that gnaws the heart
Of a school girl whose two legs have been amputated?
None can, for desolation baffles articulation
 
What words can portray the hushed horror,
The gruesome dismay
Of dying humans being devoured by dogs?
None can for hideousness is beyond idiom
 
Words can only glide over the surface:
Suffering is too distant for them to reach
It even defies those who suffer—
Let alone those who – like us –
Watch from a safe distance!

Farhat Ahmed Ali

 
* All the incidents in this poem are real. They  took  place during the 2009  barbaric Israeli onslaught of Gaza