On Two Slaughters

Kishinev 1903 - Gaza 2026

Bialik wrote ‘In the City of Slaughter’ and ‘On the Slaughter’ as a response to the Kishinev pogrom of April 1903. In that pogrom 49 Jews were murdered, 92 were gravely wounded, 500 were lightly wounded, and hundreds of homes and places of business were plundered and destroyed.

In Gaza tens of thousands of innocent have been killed. More than 1000 since the “ceasefire.”

No poem has yet been written for them in Hebrew.

‘Arise, go now unto the city of slaughter, and come into the courtyards,

and with thine own eyes shalt thou see, and with thine own hand shalt thou touch, upon the fences

and upon the trees and upon the stones and upon the plaster of the walls,

the clotted blood and the hardened brains of the slain’.ack currently does not support true text columns, I publish it as a sequence of images.

Bialik, Kishinev 1903

Heavens, beg mercy for me!

If there be a God in you, and unto that God a path,

and I have not found it,

pray ye then for me!

My heart is dead, no prayer is left upon my lips,

and the hand is weary, and there is no more hope,

How long, how long, how long?

Hangman! Here is a neck, rise up and slaughter!

Behead me like a dog, thine is the arm and the axe,

and all the earth is my gallows,

and we, we are the few!

My blood is forfeit, strike the skull, and let the blood of murder spurt,

the blood of suckling babe and of the aged, upon thy garment,

and it shall not be blotted out, forever, forever.

And if there be justice, let it appear at once!

But if after my destruction beneath the sky

justice shall appear,

then let its throne be overturned forever!

and in everlasting wickedness let the heavens rot;

and ye too, go, ye wicked, in this your violence,

and live by your blood, and be cleansed.

And cursed be he who says, Revenge!

A vengeance such as this, the vengeance for the blood of a little child,

Satan has not yet created,

let the blood pierce the abyss!

let the blood pierce down to the depths of darkness,

and eat in the darkness, and burrow there

through all the rotting foundations of the earth.

Gaza, 2026

The heavens, heavens for missiles,

and the earth heaps upon heaps.

O powers on high, I have despaired of you.

Had you an eye left, or still a heart within you,

behold the children of Gaza beneath the clods of earth,

lying unquiet upon their resting places,

and their mothers, their breasts run dry,

searching in the ashes

for small fingers, a lock of hair, a name.

There is no more prayer left in me.

Pray ye on my behalf.

My voice is choked with smoke,

my heart bleeds out among the houses

laid waste like temples of the past.

Pilot, here is a roof of tin.

There a blue blanket.

Beneath it an infant lies curled,

awaiting you in its terror.

Strike, spare not,

for their peaceful death is better

than a life spared by the mercy of your arrows;

angel of death on wings of iron,

and in my hand only a stone from the ruins of my childhood

to mark thereby the place of my unknown grave.

All the earth is my pit.

Its windows are gaping wounds.

And we,

who yet remain to tell and to count,

know the dead by their names,

one by one, beyond number.

Their blood, look, is spattered,

an infant’s blood mingled with his grandmother’s,

staining the tablecloth,

the dead reclining at their last meal.

Their name is blotted out forever

in water, in fire, or in forgetting.

And if there be justice,

let it not wait for the burial of the child in the soil of his Gaza,

let it come at once, and bow its head beside me, toward me.

And when our voice falls silent,

let the justice of the hypocrites come,

let their throne topple backward,

let their necks be broken

as were the blows they dealt, as was the slaughter of those they slew.

And cursed be he who says, Vengeance.

No vengeance for the blood of any child

will bring back his laughter,

never again to rest in his mother’s sour smelling, blood soaked embrace.

There is not yet born the god who knows

how to revive spilled blood.

And you also who seek

to avenge the name of my children,

cease.

Your vengeance is a mine

hollowing out graves for the children of tomorrow.

It is not vengeance that I seek,

it is remembrance that I demand.

Remember the places and the names,

the slayers,

the days in which they lived

and the day on which they ceased to be.

Remember, until a man shall rise

and say, enough.

And until then I lie here,

beneath the dust of my house,

waiting for the heavens,

which heard not my voice,

to remember, at the least,

my name.