Israel/Gaza: Photos at Two Ends of a Week

ON TIME

EVER eating, never cloying,
All devouring, all destroying,
Never finding full repast,
Till I eat the world at last.

– Jonathan Swift

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire,
let alone the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart after the excitement is over,
when you can talk only about a great weariness.

A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.

Let it be
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: a wildpeace.

— Samih al-Qasim

(poem 1: online literature. poem 2: Palestine-Israel Journal . photo 1: Alaa Badarneh/EPA caption: A Palestinian demonstrat0r hurls stones at Israeli soldiers during protests against the incursion in Gaza, at Howwara checkpoint near the West Bank city of Nablus on July 18, 2014. photo 2 : Uriel Sinai for The New York Times. published 7/26/14. caption: An Israeli soldier rode in an armored personnel carrier near the border with Gaza.”)