Mohammed Moussa (2026) The face before you: To write poetry on genocide.

Posted by celticman on Fri, 19 Dec 2025

William Blake Says: Every Thing That Lives is Holy.  

‘Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking

                we have done enough killing’.

Mass murder, displacement, famine. Blake was wrong. We can never get enough killing.

W.H. Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant, got it. ‘When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laugher, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.’

It’s personal for Mohammed Moussa. His mother, his sisters their husbands and his nieces and nephews were collateral damage in an ongoing collective genocide.

I’ll republish his poems, one a day as a reminder.

The Birds

I struggle to teach the birds about war,

so instead I ask them

to give their wings to mourning mothers

in Tal Al Zeater, their feather

to the children buried here in Refah’s tents,

their skins to the bleeding babies of Jaballa,

their tongues to those

who passed away silently beneath

the chatter of bombs,

and their songs to the camp children

who have forgotten how to sing.

  

 

 

Notes.

Tal Al Zeater

Date of massacre: 12 August 1976 

-Perpetrators: Lebanese Christian militias (Kataeb/Phalange, Tigers Militia, Guardians of the Cedars, others) 

- Victims: Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims 

- Deaths: 

  - Estimated 1,500 killed (historian Helena Cobban) 

  - Palestinian sources claim higher numbers 

- Siege duration: 52 days before the final assault 

- Outcome: 

  - The camp was destroyed 

  - Survivors were displaced 

  - It became one of the most infamous massacres of the Lebanese Civil War

 

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The camp was designated - A PLO stronghold in a predominantly Christian area 

- Strategically located 

- Caught in the wider conflict between Lebanese Christian militias, Palestinian factions, and Syrian involvement

 

The siege and massacre were part of a broader campaign to expel Palestinians from certain areas of Lebanon.

Rafah’s tents” refers to the massive tent camps in and around Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have been forced to shelter during the Gaza war.

These tents are not organized camps — they are makeshift shelters, often built from:

  • plastic sheets
  • scrap wood
  • tarpaulins
  • blankets
  • whatever families can find

Many are erected on roadsides, empty lots, beaches, and rubble.