Let Yourself Be Shattered By Gaza

In the suburbs they live with animals in their homes
who they treat like people and love like children
while ignoring real children in Gaza.

They’ll take a baby dog away from its mother
and hack its ancient canine conditioning
to mistake a western nuclear family for its wolf pack
in order to fill the void in their hearts
which yearns for unconditional love,
all while hoarding their own love
so far deep in their chest caves
that they cannot feel anything for a Palestinian burn victim
in a bombed-out hospital
who is screaming because there’s no painkiller.

We have so far isolated ourselves from nature
that we need to fill our homes with potted plants
and docile, domesticated animals
just to feel whole.

We drink our wine and chuckle at memes
and talk to our dogs like we talk to babies
while the world turns to fire
and feral dogs feast on corpses in Gaza.

These last 14 months have shattered me.
Shattered me beyond the power of recollection.

But sometimes it’s good to be shattered.

Sometimes it’s good to be dashed to the floor
and cracked wide open
so that life can get a word in.

Sometimes the heart must be broken
to smash through the calluses and cataracts
which accumulate on its surface
and return us to our original tenderness.

This world will break your heart
and then pour plant medicine into the cracks.

It will show you a dead Palestinian child,
and then show you a white kite in the sky.

It will drop you to your knees screaming in anguish,
cursing a God you don’t even believe in,
bawling your eyes out,
only to open them and stare in wonder
at a dandelion growing through the cracks in the concrete.

It will annihilate everything you believed about humanity
in a blazing holocaust,
and then leave you blinking and bewildered
in a mysterious universe of unfathomable beauty,
the rusted chains of preconception
incinerated from your eyes.

Again and again and again
we are shattered to dust and scattered to the wind
by the cruelty of this world,
slowly learning that,
if we can fully surrender to the shattering,
it will return us to that primordial clarity
we abandoned long ago
when we set out to create this mess
in the first place.

Let yourself be shattered
by heartbreak, by loss, and by Gaza.

Let your whole universe
be reduced to ashes.

Let it all die away,
and then stand up,
and rejoin the fight,
eyes no longer clouded
by anything that could be destroyed
by truth.

Listen to a reading by Tim Foley:

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/let-yourself-be-shattered-by-gaza