This poem is called “Just Another Death of a Palestinian Baby” by The Reverend Debra Susannah Mary Rhodes, CMMR, written soon after the genocide began

“My baby is dead,” she wailed!
Another Palestinian mother standing helplessly
as her baby was ripped from her arms,
his body strewed about like the sand in the desert
beyond the border.
Sifting through rubble on her bloody knees
she searched furiously, searched for a part…
any part… of her beloved son.
Three days earlier her daughter had been shot
as their house was destroyed by artillery shells.
The noise still reverberated inside her,
causing her bones to clatter like a toy skeleton
and her ears to shut down in shock.
Finally finding a tiny little finger, she grabbed it
and held it close to her heart.
Was it his?
Does it matter?
It was someone’s baby, and she was a mother.
Running to the only church left standing,
she brought his finger up to the altar,
placed it before the tabernacle,
knelt…
and screamed.
Screamed until her throat was raw while Jesus watched
from his cross, weeping.
With nothing left inside, she laid down prostrate,
barely breathing,
and then looked up just as a tear fell on her cheek
from high above her.
For the first moment in 90 days she felt
clean… loved…. held…
Just then another woman came stumbling in,
sobbing,
clutching a piece of fabric to her heart.
And the moment died, just like everything else.

Mother Debbi is a writer and a priest in the Episcopal Church, and she and her husband, also a priest, co-founded The Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer in 2018, open to all baptized Christians, that receives God’s grace from The Daily Office, Daily Mass, and personal prayer, and then works to exorcise the injustice, oppression, and violence of Empire from our lives and live into the Kingdom of God the way the early Christians did. Mother Debbi loves all aspects of “Spiritual Motherhood,” and has spent much of her adult life volunteering in jails and maximum-security prisons, bringing Christ’s love to the “least of the least of these.”