(written in the wake of Israeli Gaza attacks, 2014)
What does it feel like
To pull a trigger on a school
Annointed with mission
Anaesthetised with grim purpose
Gripped by focus.
Chaverim!
That belly-warming guttural
That dissolves my morality
In campfire song
Annoints me with muscular history.
What must it feel like
To pull a trigger on a school
Chaverim!
The soldier is a traveling salesman
Sad with the weight of road routine
Peddling a wretched dignity
Out in the weird
Where family cannot see The Shame.
Lay down your head
On a melancholic bed
Rise to the humility of the day
Of smiling perjury
Where the family cannot see the sell.
To pull a trigger
On a school
Chaverim!
Doubt dissolves too
In military shouts
In platoons of fear and courage
Under the umbrella of command
Out there in the weird.
The trigger you pull is neutral
No-man’s-land
Between man and boy
An instrument of command
Theirs to pull not mine.
What does it feel like
To pull a trigger on a school
Out there in the weird
In the shadow of Jacob
Fighting with angels.
It feels like nothing
But nothing feels like it
Out there in the weird
Far from family
Out of the family’s eye.
Come home chaver
Back to the street
Away from the shouts
In a garden of guilts
With no escape in a trigger.
What does it feel like
To pull a trigger on a school
In the eye of a mother
In the eye of a sister
In the eye of a friend
In eyes that know
Children died
Spleens splattered on child faces
Bloody flesh dripping down stone walls
Young fingers wrenched from tiny hands
Pulverised heads of innocent minds now blown
What does it feel like
To pull the trigger
To command the pull
To determine the command
To approve the determination
To vote the approval
To glory in the vote
To pull the trigger for glory.
Don’t go home chaver
In from the weird
The shame of the death of children
Like grit in a glass
Will not dissolve.
July 2014
SavilleKushner 