Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Against the Ongoing Genocide in Gaza

Graphology Superscription 142: genocide phase 2 Gaza

 

The thin stretch of land Gazan Palestinians

have called home is more than a ‘sea view’.

 

But complicated by rubble and the odour of death,

the US will help decorate the guilty reminders.

 

And though it might be deft to say Trump’s

declarations are a real estate developer’s

 

sense of land-usage, of the profit

that will come from a glossy future,

 

it’s actually far more devious than going

eighteen holes (ready-formed by shell-

 

craters). In the sweeping aside of logger-

head turtles and jackals, in ensuring

 

contracts for Americans who make so many

of the weapons that have reshaped the past,

 

the endgame policies are energised

to drive the people out, to win history.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Friday, January 17, 2025

Against Antisemitism

As someone who campaigns against all violence and for those suffering in Gaza (and other zones of violence), I am appalled by the attacks on synagogues in Australia. Deeply, deeply appalled. Some of you might have read my On the Outskirts collection with poems such as 'Denkmal' which try to challenge antisemitism across history. The conflating of 'Jew' with the Israeli military/govt is fundamentally wrong (it is supported by WASP America etc, what’s more) and is a typical and toxic bigotry come of an unwillingness to analyse closely. Anyway, this is not my point. My point is that as someone who tries to speak out against injustice, I feel I must speak about and against these attacks. 


Graphology Superscription 136


I call from the haze of illness

to the perpetrators of hate against Jews


in Sydney and Melbourne, I call across

the continent to those who have lost


their way by substituting the actions 

of government and military for the lives


of those who would worship in peace, 

who are not wielding weapons. You


will define prayer as you define prayer,

you will make arguments of association


and excuse or seek to legitimise

your cause of DNA and deculturism.


You have blamed and judged and held

responsible and converted your rage


to hate or, most likely, you have simply found a way

to express your deeply entrenched antisemitism


while denying it’s that, or not. I address 

the perpetrators, I address those who have 


lost their way and shifted blame in the signs 

of Nazism while deploying Brown Shirt tactics,


those who search for symbols and accelerants 

to focus their own violence, their own anger


that has been dislodged from compassion,

making one place stand for another,


burning the holy as others have burnt

the holy, and reasoning that it is justifiable.


It is not. It never was. You operate by stealth

lodged in your hoodies, you speak among


yourselves to justify your racism, your bigotry,

and you turn your backs on all the suffering


in all places. You’ve tapped into violence

begets violence to use as an excuse, an action,


when your hatred makes and undoes

history by unequal, bloody measures.



John Kinsella