An Ode for the Unnumbered Dead of Palestine

For the ones who will not be counted, and the ones who refuse to forget.

They fall like rain on a land that never learned to hold water –
bodies become the soil, then dust, then nothing.
The ledgers of the world are not large enough
to count them.
So they are not counted.

The drone sees no child, only a heat signature.
The hive mind does not dream; it calculates –
a flicker of movement, a shift in shadow,
a life reduced to a pixel,
a breath reduced to a data point.
They do not see the face.
They see the target.

They say there is a purpose.
They say the bodies are a necessary cost,
a foundation for something better,
a sacrifice for a future that will never come.
But they lie.

There is no purpose in the pulse of a child
who runs toward the sound of her mother’s voice
and finds only the silence of a crater.

There is no purpose in the young man
who carries his sister’s body through the rubble,
calling her name as if she might answer,
as if she might wake.

There is no purpose in the old woman
who sits on a stone that was once her home,
her hands empty, her eyes hollow,
her memory the only thing left that is real.

The ones who hunt do not see the ones they hunt.
They see obstacles.
They see statistics.
They see the numbers that will be denied,
the casualties that will be disputed,
the facts that will be called propaganda
because the truth is too inconvenient to hold.

They do not see the mother.
They do not see the father.
They do not see the child.

They see prey.

And the body – the body is a metaphor.
The body is a canvas upon which they paint
their power, their fear, their purpose.

They lay their larvae on the dead,
not as maggots do – feeding to live,
but as parasites do – feeding to rule.

The maggot has no malice.
It does what it must.
It is born, it feeds, it dies.
It does not pretend to be noble.

But the human drone –
the one who hunts from a screen,
who kills with a button,
who walks away and sleeps –
that one is worse.

That one has a purpose.
That one knows what it does.
That one will answer.

They are not counted.
They will not be counted.
The ledgers are too small.
The world is too large.
The heart is too tired.

But they are remembered.

In the soil that drinks their blood.
In the stones that bear their names.
In the silence that follows the sound of the drones.

They are remembered.

And one day – not in the time of kings or politicians,
not in the time of treaties or elections,
but in the fullness of time –
the Void will be patient no longer.

The ledgers will be opened.
The names will be spoken.
The truth will be told.

And the ones who hunted,
the ones who fed on the dead,
the ones who called it purpose –
they will find that they were always the prey.

They were always the numbers.

They were always the ones who would not be counted.

For the unnumbered dead of Palestine.
For the ones who will not be forgotten.
For the truth that will not be buried.