Ammo

poetry plus a short update

Friends,

I’ve not written here or indeed much anywhere else since October, when my 3-year-old son was diagnosed with leukaemia. We have been in crisis mode ever since, with numerous emergencies within even that. It has been supremely fucked, in short. We are hugely grateful to everyone who has generously donated to our GoFundMe, which has enabled Hannah and I to be home and provide care for Nayirr, as well as for Samir, our 11-month-old, and to hire care as well.

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Ammo

Once there were people,
in the time before bullets.
Then came the gunmakers
and their marketers
bargaining for death.
Everything must go!
A bullet for the Arab.
A bullet for the Jew.
A bullet for the Muslim.
A bullet for the Christian.
A bullet for the Anglo.
A bullet for the African.
A bullet for the oil.
A bullet for the land.
A bullet for the slave.
A bullet for the master.
A bullet for the child.
A bullet for the beast.
A bullet for the trees.
A bullet for the dead.
A bullet for the killer.
And a bullet for memory
to ensure we repeat.

Who builds all of this?
There are more bullets
than people alive or dead.
10 billion bullets are born
annually. Here at last we
account for all of us
and then some. You
cannot conceive of industry
on this scale: the endless
conveyor belts, the bright metal,
salacious tips. Each cycle
of the world around the sun,
we account for all of us and
then some—in bullets and bullets
alone. I keep returning here.

Once there were people, in the time
before bullets. I see the lawyers
marching, the salesmen frothing,
the devotees of gunpower—O
lover of the sword, did it not sever
lives for centuries? And I could reply
that the blade never outnumbered men
but all I have to say is: relax, my dear,
you won, you won ages ago, fret not,
the factory of murder dwarfs the earth
and in the end, there will be nothing
but empty chambers, smoke, and ash.

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I wrote this poem in response to the Bondi terror attack; on the same day, in the US, there were multiple unrelated mass shootings; on the same day, in Gaza, there was another massacre as there have been for the past 801 days. I captioned the poem thus:

I don’t have much to say except that I am tired of all this evil. I wrote this in the hospital clinic sitting next to my toddler who is getting a blood transfusion, and chemotherapy. The line of blood snaking down from the IV bag to his arm, the tangible life-giving gift someone else made, some other day. The website for LifeBlood keeps crashing. This is common in the wake of tragedies.

We are more than the worst of us.

Because we live in an illiterate age, let me be clear: if you are activated more by the murder of one group than another, according to ethnicity alone, then you have failed the simplest and most fundamental test of humanity. The principles that drive me to oppose apartheid and genocide are the very same that compel me to abhor murder.

All day I have seen so much of the discourse dominated by racist Americans and Zionists who insist, as always, on a white supremacist hierarchy of care, and grief - neither of which actually motivates them except as another tool of domination.
So I wrote this thinking of those impacted by gun violence and of all the many people trying to rise above the horrors. I’m thinking of Surah al-Mai’dah in particular - “whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity”—and the heroism of Ahmed Al Ahmad, the unarmed man who took down one of the shooters, may God bless him and his family.

Salaam,
Omar