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A future lament on Gaza

will they ask us what it is like?

what it is like to have lived through the first genocide

with surround sound & high definition

to carry the slaughter in our back pockets

like loose change & forgotten receipts

while we stood in Starbucks lines

debating oat milk versus almond

& whether Mercury was in retrograde again


listen

and i mean really listen because 

this is the sound of a whole generation

that learned to swipe past mass graves

on the way to check our horoscopes,

that mastered the beautiful choreography

of care without consequence,

of loving humanity in the abstract

while humans died in full resolution


In a future where everyone loudly claims

they were against this from the beginning

but i was there in the great silence,

i watched us perfect the art

of righteous scrolling,

of changing profile pictures to watermelons

& calling it resistance while ordering

from Amazon & pretending

our convenience wasn’t complicit

in the machinery of erasure


Oh the almighty intimacy of it

watching children die over breakfast cereal,

seeing mothers scream into phone cameras

while we sat in artisan cafes 

or listening to true crime podcasts,

the algorithm feeding us just enough horror

to keep us engaged but not enough

to make us dangerous to the profit line


you'd think we were monsters

but we were trained monkeys

dancing to a dopamine drumbeat,

taught that witnessing was action,

that sharing was solidarity,

that our thumbs were weapons

How our hearts were hashtags

That revolution would fit in 280 characters

or less


i remember the protests - such beautiful protests

where we chanted “never again”

while livestreaming the very “again”

happening in real time,

where we held signs about genocide

then went home to scroll through TikTok

& pretend our silence wasn’t consent,

our comfort wasn’t complicity


And here’s what breaks me open

like a piñata full of sharpened blades:

how normal it all became,

how quickly we adapted to carrying

the weight of dead children

in our notifications,

how we learned to love with one hand

while the other stayed numb

from overexposure to atrocity


and one day everyone would say

they were always against this

but where were you when the bombs fell

in vertical videos posted at Famine AM?

where were you when mothers

held their broken babies up to cameras

begging the world to remember their names?

you were there, we were all there,

watching through glass screens

& calling it bearing witness


you'll ask why we didn’t stop it

as if our hearts weren’t algorithms

programmed for comfortable distance,

as if we hadn’t been conditioned

to consume suffering like entertainment,

to rate the authenticity of grief

in comment sections,

to debate whether children’s screams

were worth missing our yoga class


& the worst part

the part that haunts my sleep

wasn’t the images of destruction

but how quickly they became wallpaper,

how we learned to multitask empathy,

to feel bad about genocide

while simultaneously worrying

about our credit scores, making rent 

& whether that text was left on read


one day everyone will have been against this

from the very beginning,

will claim they knew it was wrong,

will build monuments to our collective shame

& pretend they weren’t part

of the great swipe-past,

the beautiful amnesia

that let us sleep through slaughter


but i remember the sound of silence

not the noble Simon, Garfunkl'ed kind,

the ugly kind that tastes like privilege

& sounds like notifications turned off,

like “it’s complicated” & “both sides”

& “what can one person do anyway?”

while children bled out in real time

While we debated whether their deaths

were worth disrupting our commute


so when your children ask

what we did during the livestreamed genocide,

don’t tell them we didn’t know

tell them we carried the evidence

in our pockets every day,

that we made their dying into content,

their mothers’ screams into shareable moments,

their blood into engagement metrics

that fed the same machine

we pretended to resist


somewhere in the digital graveyard

of expired stories & deleted posts,

their ghosts are still broadcasting,

still trying to break through

the static of our beautiful indifference,

still hoping we might look up

from our screens long enough

to remember that love

was supposed to be a verb,

not a hashtag trending

in the wrong direction..

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