I leave this for your descendants

For your ears are deaf and your eyes blind

Your children will carry your names with bowed heads

This generation of vipers will pass

You will carry this legacy as a badge of calumny

It will be a testimony to your perfidy

No name calling is required

Every child who survives will remember

I want to go Apollo Creed on you all

I want to seize your false piety and warped dreams of Armageddon

And scream, WHAT’S THE MATTER WTH YOU?

I was raised on these stories

Munich, Hitler, poor Anne Frank

who should be a happy Jewish grandmother

Interspersed with moments of glory—ahh, Entebbe!

Reality would intrude little by little, exploding in Lebanon

Yet no one asks why

Why do they hate each other?

Animosity does not arise from nothing

We’re never taught to ask why

Only to choose sides, and it’d better be OUR SIDE or else

How many times have we seen these images

Emaciated shells that should be full and round

Flesh stretched tight over bones that should never be so pronounced

This is not God’s handiwork, this is no freak of nature

It is always deliberate

The speeches so full of platitudes

Oh, they were so convincing

But now I don’t know who you people are

Or what sick place you’re coming from

Our eyes are open, the masks have fallen

You people have debased our proud nation

Marco, Donnie you have shamed us

Joe, worst of all you taught me shame

Three years into your term and we’d have followed you, gladly

Thanks to you, old man, I’ve begun to shed my islamophobia

Would that you had ever done the same

Is it just children in general

Or do you despise babies who don’t quite look like you?

Is their complexion not quite right

Or is it just you?

Were your mothers this disdainful of life?

I would not waste retribution on your souls

I offer you something worse

I hope and pray that you will be forgotten

In days to come I wish it that your names,

Netanyahu, Trump, Biden

When they are spoken

Our descendants will rise from the ashes of civilization

And ask, Who? Sorry, those names don’t mean anything to me

You have created nothing

You have saved nothing

You have made NOTHING great again

May you be footnotes, barely registering

On the ledger of man’s inhumanity