Fifty-One Empty Places at the Dinner Table

 

Fifty-One Empty Places at the Dinner Table

 

Crumbling bones and human dust

Lives destroyed, their pitiful remains

Lie scattered in unmarked pits

And red brick ovens across Europe

Had they all been given graves

Eight decades ago

They’d turn in them now

 

As Gazans flee their family homes

In search of a safer place

That won’t be bombed until next week

They bury their dead in back yards

And while cemeteries overflow

Thousands rot beneath the rubble

Not even a place in an unmarked pit

 

Survivors of Himmler’s heinous plan

Found that in their promised land

Of milk and honey

Watermelons grew

They knew exactly what to do

Having seen it done before

With genocide not herbicide

 

Eighty years on from the horror scene

When Auschwitz gates were opened wide

We’ve new atrocities every day

If anyone should know better now

It’s they who shelled and shot and killed

The fifty-one people in the queue

For flour and rice at Khan Younis

 

Twenty-five miles of Levantine coast

Humanity’s bloodiest slaughterhouse

A death camp like never seen before

For sixty thousand murdered souls

And more who’ll fall in blood and dust

As close behind those tanks and guns

Follow deadly hunger and disease

 

Mistress Brussels, Donald McDonald

And Public Enemy Number Ten

Arm Zion then look the other way

Who cares about the rights of children?

Who cares about all those who starve?

Who cares about international law?

Only those with hearts and spines

 

---

Image:

My own simple drawing of a phoenix; the very apt emblem of Gaza City.

 

Link to the BBC news report on the atrocity committed by Israel Defence Forces at Khan Younis aid distribution centre in Gaza on 17 June 2025.