This article was republished 8 March 2026 for International Women’s Day to highlight the incredible women of Bylines Network
Twenty months ago I wasn’t that interested in learning about the Israel/Palestine situation and it took a radio interview to ignite my awareness of what was happening in Gaza after the events of 7 October. I was listening to a British doctor (a paediatrician who had recently returned home from working in a Gaza hospital) who was speaking about what she had witnessed there. Some of the children had been accompanied by their mothers, she said, but she had also come across babies with no family members in attendance, one of whom was labelled ‘Unknown 99’.
It became the first poem that I wrote about the genocide in Gaza and it has been followed by a series of others. The Jesuit priest and peace activist, Daniel Berrigan once wrote: “The difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything“ and it has resonated with me. So, although I know that a simple poem or poems cannot change the ongoing suffering of a nation, I feel that I am at least doing something.
Ignorance breeds prejudice
I was introduced to my Persian husband in New York over 45 years ago. He was good-looking, attentive, clever and kind – all the attributes you hope to find in someone who might one day become a partner for life, and for the first three months of our ‘going out’ I assumed he was an Arab. It was total ignorance on my part, of course, and it’s a shameful admission to be making now, but if I’m honest about the reason for my lack of general knowledge, it’s because I simply wasn’t interested in knowing.
I was at a gathering of people at a party once when someone asked me about my husband, so I answered with the same words I used above: “He’s good-looking, attentive, clever and kind,” I said. “Ah, but what will he be like when he takes you back to Iran with him?” came the collective response. Ignorant and insulting all at once, but not entirely surprising if you haven’t even made an effort to question the often unjust and misleading ideas we’re being constantly fed in the media. It seems to me that if you’re told something often enough it creates a twisted truth of its own, whether true or not.
The media distorts the truth: look for alternative sources
Learning one’s trade as a writer takes perseverance, stubbornness and, I hope, integrity. I started my writing career late in life and am still on that steep learning curve of what is acceptable by one publication and not another. Perhaps that would have mattered more to me if I was younger with a lot more to lose by speaking out, but now at the age of 70, I really only care about being true to myself.
And I care about how the words that I put on the page can be construed. Where Gaza is concerned, it has been truly eye-opening how many mainstream news channels abuse and twist language in the most disingenuous way. Yet you only learn to recognise this when you actively seek out other sources of information in order to find some sort of informed balance. Nowadays I pay a lot more attention to news channels and podcasts where diverse opinions are offered by differing academics, former diplomats, economists and more. It helps to formulate a much wider view of what is happening in the world, yet many people seem reluctant to even seek any alternatives, and if you’re only being fed one side of a situation, how can you possibly understand the other side?
Writing from personal conviction
I can only speak for myself when I say that what has been happening in Gaza has truly moved me and I make no apology for the series of poems I have written over the past 20 months about a genocide that has happened in front of us all, often in real time. So, when I begin to write a piece of prose or a poem that I know will probably irk someone, I ask myself as a human being, is what I’m trying to communicate based on knowing the fundamental difference between right and wrong, or good and evil? If the answer is yes then I can only write what I believe in and hope that for some of you reading this, you might connect to it in some small way too.
Haibun for Gaza
Would it matter what I told you? If I said that my sister’s warm cheek presses into my own cheek like a kiss, the blood from her wounds leaking into my mouth as hot as a river of fire? Or how it feels to already know that her softening weight was what protected me? Or if somewhere beyond this choking darkness the voice of our father ricochets through the rubble as he hunts for our collective breaths? Would it actually matter? I call out, Baba, Baba, into the bruised space of my mouth, but the sound is seeped within itself, lost to my own consciousness and the growing stickiness of my sister’s skin. Yet I think, here I am safe. Safer than in the space above that is the most dangerous place on earth to be a child, and where our father is grinding his fingers into dust. So, even in this hell where my sister has found her own paradise, I am thankful. And Allah is merciful. He has removed from my ears the drill of the drones and the threat they have carried all the hours of all the days since the beginning. There is a kind of comfort in this unfamiliar quiet and I close my eyes to it, welcoming its finality, but knowing too, the suffering my own death will cause. So, I breathe and pray, my fingertips touching in a bridge of prayer inside this small mosque of air where I am waiting now, only to be unearthed.
a mote of light
in the dust of our despair
illuminates the dark
