reading room
Ten Thousand Suns
A shoe in the rubble. A notebook ash-smeared. A toy, buried in concrete.
Hospitals shelled, bread lines scattered, aid trucks stalled at the border.
Health denied. Food denied. Relief denied.
I will not excuse the blood spilled on October 7th. But what name is left for the answer of ten thousand children silenced in return?
Ten thousand suns that will never rise.
A generation extinguished before its fire was lit.
The ceiling gave way, and the sky itself broke into dust.
Britain signs it lawful, Germany stamps it necessary, America names the burning of children defence.
Licences stamped, bullets boxed, engines shipped into Gaza's night.
This is not neutrality. This is genocide by supply chain.
History is not past.
1948 bleeds into 2023, exile into blockade, occupation into rubble.
Hamas is not Gaza. It is not the child under the blanket, not the mother waiting in the bread line.
And "Israel" in our headlines is not the girl in Tel Aviv who only wanted to dance at a festival, nor the father still searching, one among 251 families, for his kidnapped son.
These are names for power, for government, for armies and parties — separate from the people who bury the dead and carry the grief.
The child is not Hamas. The mother is not Hamas. The father is not Hamas. The dead are not the politics we pin to their names.
And yet the world debates the grammar of its statements, drafts paragraphs while morgues overflow. As if silence were not another kind of weapon.
Gaza burns. And still, the rubble waits.
— Lilith