for Franck Salameh
The poets of Hamas bemoan the death of one of their own. Villanelles and sonnets deny that men from Gaza violated Jewish girls time and again, in gangs, with rabid zeal. They call it Zionist “lies” and “smokescreen.” Bloody rhymes with bloody Jewish bodies. Terza rima of mutilated babies, cut-off breasts, heroic couplets, slender Gazan stanzas by learned men who die to murder Jews. In Boston and in London poets mourn their fellow rhymesters. How they guzzle down their martyred verse on X and Instagram, their ghazals of ecstasy amid the rubble, hamasaat of their chivalrous exploits into Israeli farmland, quasaa’id to mark the glorious advent of intifada, maraathi where Israel always rhymes with death— in London and in Boston poets spread this hatred.
