Gentle Aboud Poem by Bob Green

Gentle Aboud
Just out from Ramallah
Where Jesus himself
Once preached at each door

Now the settlers build walls
Steal your water and poison
the Sabbath itself
As decency fails

Do they think there’s no God?
That their State is redeemed
By the ovens of yore?
That their crimes are expunged
By colonial fiction?
That the truth will lie silent
As the children they’ve killed?

Now history’s own crime
Is erased by their own
and the souls of their parents
in permanent shame
groan at the forfeit
all that was human
destroyed in the conquest
of goodness and name

Now an army in prayer shawls
Rampaging in orchards
Has broken our dreams
Bulldozed and discarded
Like the olives and streams.

The remnant called “chosen”
Now frozen, rejected,
Will be scorned for all time
In betraying their God
They’ve wasted his favorites
The innocent farmers
Whose love is as food
The innocent garden
Of Gentle Aboud