A Room of My Own: Their Own Echoes Haiku

Game Show, 2024, LV

CNN debate

the alley strays bark, barking

at their own echoes

FYI: Kansas Reflector, June 27: Biden and Trump trade insults, accusations of lying in acrimonious presidential debate.

And Business Insider, June 27: Joe Biden's 1st debate was a complete disaster:

Biden appeared out of breath. He hastily began reciting facts while slurring and occasionally omitting words. At times, Biden uttered nonsensical phrases.

Added: Game Show, 2024, LVI

written in response to Haaretz, June 28: Meandering Biden, Pathological Trump: The Worst Possible Presidential Debate Was a Sad Night for America

This was a sad night for America: Biden lost. Trump lost. Hosting news channel CNN lost. And American democracy lost. For Democrats, this was the sum of all fears.

eight feet apart

two old men shout at each other

at their own echoes ...

I look out the window at stars

going dim, dimmer with fear

Added: Game Show, 2024, LVII

written in response to Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Opinion, June 27: President Joe Biden, I’ve Seen Enough

sometimes 

he stumbles over his words

most often 

he blanks out entirely ...

and yet he's a "Better Golfer!" 

FYI: To me (Ezra Klein), the blockage in people’s minds was not so much whether Biden’s age had become a really substantial risk on the campaign trail or even within the Presidency but in imagining that the Party was strong enough to do something else and take on the risk of doing something else...The Democratic Party has become this party of normalcy and of systems and of institutions

Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, LXXII: "Gaza and West Bank"

Night for Day and Day for Night ...

a girl convulsing 

on the bloodstained classroom floor

smell of Gaza's  air

scorching heat

a West Bank man strapped to the hood

of an IDF jeep

FYI: Reuters, June 25: Gazans run after Israeli strike on school-turned-shelter;  The Canadian Press, June 26: A Palestinian was shot, beaten and tied to an Israeli army jeep. The army says he posed no threat.

And Haaretz, July 1: Al-Jazeera's videos showed Israeli soldiers strapping cameras to Palestinian detainees whose hands are tied and dressing them with uniform and vests before sending them into damaged houses and tunnel shafts.

Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, LXXIII: "the oppressed"

in memory of Marek Edelman, the deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in WWII and the only leader to survive the war, who was known for his heart-and mind penetrating remark: "To be a JEW means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors"

late light lightning 

links Heaven and Gaza's ruins ...

with news on mute

my friend murmurs, what does it mean

to be a Jew to the oppressed 

FYI: Chris Hedges, Canadian Dimension, "October 8, 2023": Palestinians speak the language of violence Israel taught them:

I was a close friend of Alina Margolis-Edelman who was part of the armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in World War II. Her husband, Marek Edelman, was the deputy commander of the uprising and the only leader to survive the war. The Nazis had sealed 400,000 Polish Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto. The trapped Jews died in the thousands, from starvation, disease and indiscriminate violence. When the Nazis began to transport the remaining Jews to the extermination camps the resistance fighters fought back. None expected to survive.

Edelman, after the war, condemned Zionism as a racist ideology used to justify the theft of Palestinian land. He sided with the Palestinians, supported their armed resistance and met frequently with Palestinians leaders. He thundered against Israel’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify its repression of the Palestinian people. While Israel dined out on the mythology of the ghetto uprising, it treated the only surviving leader of the uprising, who refused to leave Poland, as a pariah. Edelman understood that the lesson of the Holocaust and the ghetto uprising was not that Jews are morally superior or eternal victims. History, Edelman said, belongs to everyone. The oppressed, including the Palestinians, had a right to fight for equality, dignity and liberty.

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors,” Edelman said.

Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, LXXIV: "October 7"

this endless loop:

October 7, October 7 ....

[and yet 

the decades before

and the day after...] bloodshedding