"One should have a big enough heart to look at victims anywhere."

        (a poem found in two New Yorker pieces during one week)

*

Violence has, in fact, remained 

relatively steady in the twentieth century.

Insistence on the singularity of the
other genocides, can [be] and is
being perceived

— And having women paraded like trophies when they were taken into Gaza

— And kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem

You are not

allowed to speak 

about a reflection of annihilatory evil

in the eyes of that girl

you are not allowed to be

in the space where I appear to others

as others appear to me

A victim and also a perpetrator

must always remember

to speak about the evil

in the same breath

is a ‘levelling'

The case is for

killing children

The true face of war
and all its emotions;
a whole for
the atrocities;
a powerful, identity-
forming trip.

These differences matter—

racial, national, and every other kind of exceptionalism—

the evil was always ordinary 

even when it was extreme.

A collaborator in

the ordinary we know

that sometimes torture is used

on Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

"How sad," said the second stone,

"We cannot see them"