War News

My friend and collaborator Beau Beausoleil’s digital book, War News, poems written during the first two months of the war in Gaza, is free to read and download from Agitate! Journal. The stark lines of the cover image by San Francisco artist Andrea Hassiba perfectly complement the poems, all of which have the same title.
‘This collection of 90 poems is a witness testimony from afar. It is an archive of grief, mourning and solidarity. It is an accounting of the cost of war. Through these powerful and devastating poems Beau reminds us that we cannot turn away. In the poet’s own words, “Our humanity, our collective morality, requires that we bear witness and then take some kind of action.”‘
I hope you will share the link/book within your own circle of artists and writers.
Download here: (top right corner) https://agitatejournal.org/

Beau writes: I’ll be reading from War News at Bird and Beckett Bookshop in San Francisco on January 4th at 7pm. My reading will be followed by an open reading and I’m hoping that some of my Bay Area poet friends will show up in solidarity and be part of that open reading.  https://birdbeckett.com/poet-beau-beausoleil-plus-open-mic-1-5-24/

War
News

These dead
don’t want
their bodies
written upon
by politicians

or sewn into
flags of war
that fly over
endless
cemeteries

Their names are
martyrs in any
prayer in
any language

These dead
don’t want
our memory
of them
loaded
into more
violence
to kill yet
another child
whose life defines
someone’s joy

War
News

There must be a way
to sleep and not
rise up to a new grief

There must be a way
of hearing the songs
in our ancient bones
without despair
emptying our hands

There must be a way
to live our lives in freedom
that does not require
the death of anyone’s child

War
News

There are still
patches of ground
where no one has
been killed

live there until you
are told to move

There are still
patches of ground
where no one has
been buried

dig a grave there
and climb into it