The Songbirds of Gaza Forsake Their Wasted Place

I do not fault the finches, green and gold, 
the old-world warblers that favor olive groves, 
the common quail, the parakeet, the kestrel
the little crake, and great-black-headed gulls.

They leave in flocks, are refugees. Now gone
are all the windowsills, the railings and the palms, 
and the minarets where they used to perch.
Amid the bedlam, how could their chicks learn 

their species’ songs—the rowdy caws and chitters, 
the trilling mating calls? Their war-torn feathers 
abrade the air, are scuffed by bone and dust 
as missile strikes leave their ears concussed. 

Carrion crows now roost on razor wire.
Before them now is all that they desire.
 





I Check In With My Millennial Daughter the Week After the Big Election 
and She Says Everything Is the Same and Everything Has Changed

Nothing about today feels different than yesterday, 
except the rain which washed three months of dust 
from the car. The water in Shayler Creek has risen 
from the rocks and, in West Philly, my daughter H weeps

most days. She says it’s harder being a woman in America 
than last Tuesday, that her body cannot contain her 
rage which burns like she’s breathing tar, and bruises her heart—
except…except when she goes to Clark Park with her daughter 

E, now three, who scrambles like a squirrel to the top 
of the climber, meets friend D and they chitter
and swap toddler stories about superheroes and TV shows
with wise owls that will later hoot the little ones to sleep. 

But H is not sleeping so well. She’s inside that horror movie 
trope where the guy on horseback with the bloodied knife 
has zombified everybody and she wonders if anything has really 
changed since Tuesday or remains as it’s always been:

That bombs have forever fallen, that stones are endlessly 
thrown, that its her time to feel mired to the waist 
in mud waiting for the mob to decide which way it will turn. 
Mostly she understands so many are buried deeper than she— 

to their necks, hearing  sirens and yowling and hoofbeats—
knowing, that gathered at the horizon, are the angry crowds 
of people with faces twisted like taut ropes and arms cocked, 
now free to let loose their fist sized rocks.






Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Abandon Journal, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig.  More at www.dickwestheimer.com