A number of our members and other Scottish poets have written poems in response to the current conflict, and have kindly given permission for them to be shared here. Scottish PEN invites further poetic and literary responses to the poems.
January 10, 2024A number of our members and other Scottish poets have written poems in response to the current conflict, and have kindly given permission for them to be shared here. Scottish PEN invites further poetic and literary responses to the poems. As always, we reaffirm our commitment to the principles of the PEN International charter:
We pledge ourselves to do our utmost to dispel race, class and national hatreds, and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in one world.
This poem does not support Palestine Action
by Harry Josephine Giles
July 2025
This poem is not a member
of Palestine Action. This poem
does not invite support for
Palestine Action, nor is it
an event that supports
Palestine Action, nor is this
poem reckless as to whether
it will encourage others to
support Palestine Action, aware
that it could encourage support
for Palestine Action, and unreason-
able in taking that risk. This poem
is not wearing clothing or
carrying articles in public
which may arouse reasonable
suspicion that it is a member
of or supports Palestine Action,
nor does it publish an item
or logo which may a-
rouse reasonable suspicion
that it is a member of or supports
Palestine Action. This poem
does not fundraise, give money
to, or hold funds intended for
Palestine Action. This poem does not
support Palestine Action.
This poem understands that direct
action taken against the eco-
nomic and military structures
waging genocide in Palestine,
against banks and fact-
ories, fences and war-
planes, constitutes serious
damage to property designed
to influence the government (or
an international governmental
organisation) to end the genocide
in Palestine and so under the Terror-
ism Act 2000 constitutes terror-
ism, which cannot be permitted
in a democratic society.
This poem understands that dam-
age to steel and glass, rubber and i-
ron by a person who is not
a member of the police, arm-
y or secret service of a UN
member state is prosecutable
under the Terrorism Act 2000, un-
like damage to femur and lung, eye
and liver by a person who is
a member of the police, army
or secret service of a UN
member state and so to every
practical purpose not prosecutable
under any national or inter-
national law, or by any act
other than by putting terrific
meat into the teeth of property.
This poem understands it is
subject to investigation
by members of the po-
lice, army or secret ser-
vice of a UN member state
to see if it has been reck-
less, that members of the
police, army or secret
service of a UN member
state, wearing the faces
of friends, may once again
enter its life and its loved
ones in order to uncover
any support for Palestine
Action, or for any future
action which might end
the genocide in Palestine,
given that such action may
also be prosecutable under
the Terrorism Act 2000, and so
this poem invites the loving
state into the clarity of poetry,
asking whatever reader may
come whether within or be-
tween its lines there is anything
that could be construed un-
der the Terrorism Act 2000
as saying the words which no-
one in a democratic society must say:
“I support Palestine Action”.
THE GIRL IN THE FIRE
For Ward Jalal Al-Shaikh Khalil
by Jim Aitken
July 2025
Originally published by Culture Matters
The whole world saw her silhouette
dancing through the flames of a school.
There was something ethereal,
some strange scene from a horror film,
of a girl running for her life.
Her image, presented as news,
a spectacle for the viewers,
was of a real flesh and blood girl
running from a bombed-out classroom,
of a girl running for her life.
Of a Palestinian girl
from Gaza running for her life
like so many other children
screaming, confused and bewildered
at the hatred for her people.
Yet her five-year-old twinkle toes,
a spectral presence in the flames,
ennobled a battered people
traumatised by indifference
as much as by missiles and drones.
And the girl too is traumatised
at the world she was born into
but she will run and stand for life,
a real- life girl in a mad world,
childhood gone before it began.
A God-Fearing Yeshiva Student
by Mario Relich
July 2025
I hope to God I am not going to be conscripted.
Of course, Gaza is part of our ancestral Promised Land,
as described in the Scriptures, and I have no problem
whatsoever with the IDF about to smite the Hamas-ruled
Arabs who call themselves Palestinians but are really
nothing but terrorists infringing on our right to live
peaceably on this sacred soil. I am prepared to fight
and shed blood to our last drop in order to seize it,
our rightful inheritance, and expel all our enemies,
like the young, vigorous David beating Goliath.
But what I am not prepared to tolerate is to be forced
to do so by politicians ruled by a Prime Minister,
who lacks the piety, like the treacherous Ahitophel,
we need in order to triumph. God, not just the IDF,
only an instrument, will ordain our final victory.
The Children of Gaza
by Bashabi Fraser
July 2025
They hold aloft their empty vessels
of various sizes, clean and shining,
as they wait, not clamorous or importunate,
but infinitely tired and gaunt –
the children of Gaza, of two
and five, of eleven and fifteen.
Their mothers squatting somewhere
on jagged fragments –
rude remnants of once throbbing cities.
Their men are absent forever.
The trucks with inadequate succour
Are halted across an unforgivable border,
While the maimed and amputated,
The splintered and blinded children languish
In dangerous zones which were once hospitals.
They have no dreams or aspirations;
Their only wish is for the mercy of instant death,
Inflicted by an unconscionable enemy.
But for now they face the slow
torture of inflicted starvation, their empty vessels
Shouting out loud to a world apparently powerless to intervene.
Overcoming
by Linda Jackson
July 2025
I shot a baby today — straight through the head.
My comrades cheered and helped me overcome
the weakness of humanity that can still the gun; load doubts
but my love for The Promised Land prevailed.
They witnessed what I could do to fulfil the covenant
and rid myself of seeing the child as fully human;
my sisters are pleased for me, are in full agreement
that this is testament to my commitment and will
to power for the divine State of Israel.
And Still It Goes On
by Bob Davidson
November 2024
And still it goes on
Day after day
Bomb after bomb
And we’ve nothing to say
As we watch from the sidelines
The body count grows
Bairns in their body bags
Row after row
While the murdering bastards
Act with impunity
As they bulldoze and bomb
And destroy each community
No one can say that they didn’t know
When it’s in all our pockets
It’s all out on show
And still it goes on
And still we do nothing
But watch on our phones
The death of a people
The destruction of homes
More bodies in blue bags
Industrially buried
Graves dug by machine
Random and hurried.
No water to drink
No crumb left to eat
Just rubble and dust
Where once was a street
And still it goes on
And still we do nothing
But give them the means
And point out the targets
And stare at our screens
And watch on our phones
And watch and watch and wonder
Why doesn’t someone
Do something to stop them?
And still it goes on
Devastation: Gaza, Dec. 2023
by Mario Relich
12/11/23
A tall, bearded, dignified man in a white robe
looks at the rubble all around him, almost oblivious
to the sound of explosions not too far away.
He turns to the camera on him, totally helpless,
and stoically explains to the BBC correspondent
that his little daughter had disappeared under
a collapsing apartment block, now certainly dead,
collateral victim of a war he didn’t start.
His anger is subdued, yet it’s all too easy to see
in him an Old Testament or Koranic patriarch.
Nothing can mitigate his grief, not even
the cat he holds and caresses in his arms.
Land of Olives
by Linda Jackson
The longest genocide in living history
final solution on the borders of Hell.
A terrorist attack means obliteration of the land,
of the people growing olives,
thyme and quiet roses
Framed on all sides by the massive state,
cowered down in leaderless abandon,
ears deafened, eyes dust.
Is anyone willing to help us find water,
food, light and air?
This slaughter can never be the answer
to the half-lives we’ve lived
the brutal way we die.
Mouth filled with concrete,
stones pile above
You have killed me but I am living
the woman cries,
and men use strength they never knew
but can pull no family through the rubble
of this end time
OFF
by Jim Mackintosh
and what now the sanctuary
of an ambulance, red crescent
splinters in dust grey choke-light
the oxygen of innocence
turned off
flatlined in cliff edge despair
laser precise justification from
a remote conscience lost or
stolen in a darkened room
stripped to the functions of war
surging in and out of plain sight
to be shaped and manipulated
into the acceptable accounts
for general consumption
as if truth was no longer relevant
the ladder of hope alight – its
rungs of ash in mediterranean wind
always out of reach of the urgent
spirals past tanks and drones, out
between bairn-soldiers footsteps
like lost souls in thyme scented sun
LEAVE ME NOW
by Jim Mackintosh
We only ever hear it from behind dumb glass yet
the crumple and choke of broken lives cannot be
ignored by adjusting the volume on the television
as it fills with the hellish gloop of blood and dust.
How’s your life doing? That’s nice. The usual
chaos of family? Work in the morning, more bills,
no work in the morning then your mobile lights up
and your world crashes, ‘You don’t know me but
we’re bombing your home in two hours. Leave!
Tell all your neighbours – leave now or die soon!’
And the play park where your children laughed,
shared innocence is now a midnight sanctuary
where the breeze off the sea is now a cruel wind
spiralling in bomb dust clouds of destroyed homes
where children’s futures were planned, buried now
under the rubble of collective punishment. Hello!
How’s your life now? That’s nice. Have a nice day!
Eyeless
by Ruth Aylett
Originally published by Culture Matters
They bombed other people’s houses
in Gaza, fish-in-a-barrel
so we sold them some more bombs
agreed that those others
were terrorists
so the world was probably
better off without them
agreed that the planes
had done everything possible
to avoid civilian casualties
and sold them some more bombs
agreed that they had every right
to defend themselves against
fish in barrels
who after all were terrorists,
had only themselves to blame
and we sold them some more bombs
But answer me this
what life must you have lived
to be a terrorist aged eight
or an elderly woman terrorist
aged sixty or a doctor
in the clinic that must have been
hiding terrorists
or they wouldn’t have bombed it
would they?
and tell me how fish in a barrel
can swim away when the bombs fall
Ein Gev 1960, Gaza 2024
by Jenni Daiches
I’ve forgotten his name but remember
the dusk at Ein Gev and drinking mint tea
as he talked of his time in the Foreign Legion.
His gentleness belied his soldiering.
In that place they were all fighters, taught
to expect attack. For the first and last
time I held a weapon, fired at empty cans
on a dry slope lit with almond blossom.
How peaceful it was close to the Galilee shore,
under walls scarred by bullets, as he spoke
calmly of war, as dusk darkened the hills.
How hopeful I was.
She returns, the woman my age, scarred
by captivity. She acted on hope –
still hopeful now? Helpless to halt
the massacre but not silent, never silent.
Long gone, my Legionnaire, but his words linger.
Never silent.
Beneath the Rubble
by Jim Aitken
Originally published by Culture Matters
Beneath the rubble of Gaza
lie the broken bodies of babies, of children,
of their parents and grandparents too
along with the fragments of bomb casings
beneath the rubble of Gaza.
And it is a rubble that is generic
for it brings to mind Stalingrad
and Dresden; it brings to mind
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mosul and Aleppo
and vast swathes of Afghanistan.
Beneath the rubble of Gaza
also lie some unlearned lessons –
the one about rubble begetting more rubble
the other one that peace only comes with justice
beneath the rubble of Gaza.
Uday, One Day
by Jim Aitken
Originally published by Culture Matters
In memory of Uday Abu Mohsen who lived only one day
after being killed during the Siege of Gaza, 2023.
Uday was the baby boy’s name. Uday, it was.
He would have known so little but he would
have known he was someone with being.
He would have been welcomed and loved.
He would have been welcomed with fear
and would have known little of the blast
that ended his one- day old life, mayfly Uday.
Yet he leaves behind much more than a name.
He leaves behind the insanity of surgical strikes,
the criminality of collateral damage, the nonsense
of precision bombing, the lunatic costs – and profits –
of warfare set against the massacre of the innocents.
Uday’s death certificate was bizarrely issued before
any birth certificate arrived and the bombing continued
after his death. But mayfly Uday must be remembered
and not just in Gaza and in Palestine, not just there.
The cry of Uday must be heard in Israel, in Syria, in Iraq,
in Russia and Ukraine, in Yemen, Tigray and Sudan.
Uday’s little whimper should cross oceans, mountains
and plains, teeming cities and deserts, turning louder.
Turning louder all the time so that the whole world
begins to realise that without justice there is no peace;
that only justice can guarantee peace. Uday, one day
peace and justice will reign in your name. Uday, one day.
IN SHADOW
Ghazal for the Palestinians in Gaza
by Vicki Feaver
They go to bed in shadow,
wake to tread in shadow.
Death hurtles from the sky;
they live with dread in shadow.
Children are kept indoors:
schoolbooks read in shadow.
Where are the men and boys?
Rumours spread in shadow.
A hospital is bombed.
The wounded bleed in shadow.
Food and water are scarce.
Diseases breed in shadow.
No place is safe to shelter.
Soldiers speed through shadow.
Under the rubble of a city
the lost lie dead in shadow.
For help, for home, for peace –
prayers are said in shadow.
Not there but here, secure,
It fills my head with shadow.
Dreaming Of Chattering Sparrows
By Mike Bell
Like a quarrel of chattering sparrows,
in a pink sandstone Gaza courtyard,
children sit cross legged sharing tomorrows
They dream of leaving behind wartime sorrows –
taking flight into a future unscarred –
like a quarrel of chattering sparrows.
There’s talk of the footsteps of their heroes.
In this quarrel negatives are unheard,
as they sit cross legged sharing tomorrows.
Doctors, teachers, scientists and so it goes.
Ambition unfazed, no dream deferred by
this wee quarrel of chattering sparrows.
The picture fades to small bodies covered
in white linen shrouds. I wept and shuddered.
This wee quarrel of chattering sparrows,
no more cross legged sharing tomorrows.
The Bowl
By Mike Bell
He puts his anger in a bowl –
for the victims of oppression.
He places disgust in the bowl-
for the tactic of starvation.
He drops blame into the bowl –
as oppressors blame their victims.
He lays his helplessness in the
bowl – his prayers are not working.
He consigns dehumanisation
to the bowl – the genocide enabler.
He weeps his tears into the bowl –
mourning the loss of his brother.
He commits the saddest of all
sounds to the bowl – the heart wrenching
wail of a grieving mother.
He drops colonisers into
the bowl – and smashes it and
smashes it, with a hammer.
Image credit: Yairfridman2003, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons