BRING US HOME: A POEM FOR OCTOBER 7, 2024

On the day after the savage attack

the field remained littered with broken bodies, equipment and shells of buildings,

the brutal reminders of the slaughter.

Once the fog of war lifted,

we saw the landscape of

horror that the murderous onslaught brought

with its full rage of unending violence.

For us, the living, the survivors, the rememberers,

it will always be the day after the battle.

The earth, like our souls, is disrupted and contaminated,

signs of new life remain concealed in the poisoned earth.

We slip deep into our personal foxholes

unwilling to look out across the killing fields.

How long shall we mourn?

One year to say our memorial prayer?

Or two thousand years for a national disaster which will not heal?

And, there among the living,

are the hostages

clinging to life in dark tunnels

buried alive by their captors,

our only hope for redemption in the endless day after the battle.

And above them are the shattered cities of a people

just a mile from our emotional trenches

but a million miles from humanity.

The day after the battle has no winners.

In agony, we cry out,

“Bring them home!”

But in our hearts, we pray,

“Bring us home.”

The broken battlefield mocks us in its terrible silence

and bolts the doors of home without keys.

And so we remain in our foxholes,

Raging, crying, exhausted and praying for life itself.

𝘙𝘢𝘣𝘣𝘪 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘑. 𝘚𝘶𝘴𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘯, 𝘗𝘩𝘋