Poetry Shelf Protests: an introduction

Pro-Palestine supporters gathered in Aotea Square
(Source: Te Ahipourewa Forbes)

I am dedicating my first Protest post to Gaza. I’ve already posted Gaza poems on the blog, but I’m bringing them together here, along with others; poets and poems standing together, heart alongside heart, voice alongside voice. Some poets were unsure their poems were protest poems, but I think of the Poetry Shelf Protest series as a way of shining light, a way of showing support, a way of saying no to inhumanity, injustice, cruelty, and all manner of -isms.

Unlike so many other countries, Winston Peters recently refused to acknowledge the Palestinian State and, for many of us, this was a shameful move. Every morning we wake to the news of more unforgivable slaughter, greater starvation, lack of medical care.

In Aotearoa, we have been protesting on the streets, signing petitions, funding raising, organising readings, writing and sharing news articles and analysis, and we have been writing poetry.

In August, Airini Beautrais helped to organise a reading for Palestine in Whanganui. She said: “The event was very moving, and a lot of people were in tears, but went away feeling hopeful. Reading poetry felt like an affirmative and spirited response to an awful situation. We collected koha for grassroots organizations in Palestine.”

We’ve got to speak shout sing and whisper, hold a vital light, hold our loved ones close, hold each precious day and take the next compassionate step whether fierce or gentle.

With grateful thanks to all the poets who contributed to this collective protest.

Let’s keep writing and sharing poetry.
Let’s keep protesting.

Some GAZA poems

Prayer

Beads of war a rosary
turning round and round
between his finger and thumb
touching each one as
it circulates like oxygen
in blood evidence of atrocity
lay on the floor
on the whenua
in the red red rock at Ōnawe
like stains on the body bags
in Gaza gagging my throat
as they carry her away
without ceremony I see
the dead in the eyes of
the bereft:
“ka mate au i taku tangata”

the rosary continues
on its relentless spin
like the earth on its axis
where nobody pays for their sin
though the utu unparallels
the hara, changing the angle
of the earth now unbalanced
towards hurt, towards shame
towards a hopeless game
where the unholy become
righteous, the evildoer the
hero, the arms dealer the winner
the liar the truth-teller

kai hea te karakia kia tau ai i te rakimarie?

Ariana Tikao
Catalyst 22, 2025

Standing at the roundabout on Highway 10 on a Saturday morning, waving our Free Palestine flags and our Stop the Genocide signs, the twenty-five of us are a bit of a spectacle. Old people, young people, dogs, and children stare at us from inside new cars and little old cars, Utes with huge exhaust pipes, dirty farm trucks, ambulances, and police cars. Nearly half of the drivers toot their horn and wave; the occasional person gives us the fingers, the thumbs down, or a gesture that says we are crazy, but lots of the drivers and passengers and all the dogs just look. They open their eyes wide and stare at us for the whole time it takes to go around the roundabout and pass by; then they are gone and who knows what they will think about for the rest of this day. We are the human animals who live here, all of us parts of the sometimes kind and sometimes frightening whole.  

Lynn Jenner
from her unpublished collection The Gum Trees of Kerikeri

Gaza

The dead boy tries to open his eyes.
He wants to see the world he is leaving.
But there is nothing to see here,
nothing and nothing, and anyway he is gone.
His parents held him while he died
but they are both dead, too.
Or he held them, no one remembers.

Bill Manhire

Book of Yahoo

The Yahoo wages war to excoriate the poor,
and beat Gaza to the floor.
The Yahoo taps on his media feed,
just to watch Gaza bleed.
Gaza bleeds and the Yahoo leads
with a look-what-you-made-me-do dance video.

The Yahoo brings selfies to the slaughter.
The Yahoo declares open season for murder
of professors of literature, professors of medicine,
professors of ethics, professors of peace studies.

When the day’s food ration for Gaza might fill
an abandoned suitcase, the Yahoo decrees the suit-case
is booby-trapped and orders it blown-up with a missile.

The Yahoo decrees that, by whatever means at hand,
those left behind must draw a line in quicksand,
and prepare for their last stand in what was once homeland.

The Yahoo decrees that a zone of interest
is defined by the cries coming from Gaza,
as eyes seek eyes to confirm that what ears hear
is refugees on fire ignited with napalm.

The Yahoo decrees your daily life is rubbish,
left behind a wall taken for landfill,
and that your song will be followed by a bomb blast,
and your protest poem will be followed by a massacre,
and your people will be driven out, driven back, driven over.

The Yahoo decrees no mercy, flatten Gaza,
wipe them off the face of the earth, and if the earth
itself is grieving, then scorch it into silence.

All is written in indelible red,
but the Yahoo declares, he will not be satisfied
until the Dead Sea itself is a sea of the dead.

The Yahoo blabs secrets to ears of corn.
The hand of God scribbles red on the sky,
as puddles of blood form where bodies lie,
but what happens to stars when they die?

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
A numbskull is a numbskull is a numbskull.
A tooth is a tooth and an eye is an eye.

David Eggleton

But Not Beautiful

 

At ecstatic dance I am acutely aware for the first ten minutes or so of wanting to appear graceful     beautiful     which is the exact opposite of the point of ecstatic dance and besides everyone’s eyes are closed anyway          No one is looking at me and I can’t see myself          Finally I’m in a groove     letting myself dance     all feral and shit     this voice comes over the speakers just beneath the drum and bass and I don’t know why I think she sounds mournful and then I am inside of one of the reels that keeps playing on my phone again and again          Palestinian mother grieving her children          again the Palestinian girl with blood spreading across her chest like crushed fruit     eyes wild with fear          I am crying and swivelling my hips to a dance beat     shoving my ass cheeks from one diagonal to the other and back     letting my face crumple into its own kind of flower but not beautiful     not graceful     and my own grief rises in my throat like the same red paint spreading across the girl’s chest     ribs     buds of breasts          My grief is not about my life     it reaches back through my entire lineage          It’s why I was so scared in the pandemic     why I bellied up to a vaccine I knew nothing about          So easy to succumb to terror and the wish to make it go away with a single jab          Or three          It’s completely mixed up with the history unfolding now     Boys shot in line for flour     And now          Premies in incubators gone cold          Mothers whose breasts have run dry         And          Now

 

Kim Cope Tait

 and I want to say

 

            under the helmet, the American soldier pumps drum, excess bass, extra electric motherfucker guitar, until the music enters, urges, burns, and he says now me and my gun can release into The Zone  

                                                                       o my young one, my brother,              this recruited Alabama teen, that hired boy from Flint, from inner city, inner poverty, please don’t sing as you kill, don’t tap to red, hum to murder

                                                                                                    o mother and father of a coffin, a sad risk, the beginning of a long missing, a slow losing, I want to say you will find your child of flesh, of wish

                                                                  and Mr. Bush, son of oil and gun, break your mirror of fear, of terror, you make families wail that Allah has failed,
and the world needs to breathe again.  

 

Madeleine Slavick
I wrote this poem after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, but it also speaks to the horrors of the genocide in Gaza. 

THE RESTAURANT OF MY DREAMS

It’s 2024, October 16. The Guardian says a state-of-the-art 
fire station in western Germany that was completed last 
year at a cost of tens of millions of euros has burned 
to the ground because it had not been equipped 
with a fire alarm.

In recent dreams I’m holding a koala. 
I’m holding or hunting for a koala or my father. 
Reversing a huge car into a tiny park or my ex. 
By the time we arrive the kitchen is closed 
but we eat the owner.

For Hind alone we should all burn. 
For Hind Rajab, aged six. 
The chief and his thousand descendants say 

I die, I die, I live, I live. 
Some translate it as a question, some with a we: 
will we die? Or will we live? 
Is this the paramedics come to save us? 
Is this our beloved’s celestial body, shining again?

Hinemoana Baker

Note: I realised when Paula contacted me that although I haven’t yet been able to write a poem solely addressing the genocide, Gaza is actually in almost all of the poems I’m currently writing in some way. This one above goes some way towards describing my experience of being anti-genocide and living in Germany. Germany is the second biggest military supplier to Israel after the USA. It’s also a country whose most left-wing party, Die Linke, has only in the last weeks taken a public stance against the genocide, and whose Green Party has actively supported it. This poem was first published by Starling in Feb 2025.

Pilates could happen to anyone
after Tom Stoppard and Tusiata Avia, for H-J Kilkelly

1
H-J has her abs on two and a half springs
and I have my phone on record in the black
box under my reformer because I am going

to write a poem about Pilates I am
going to juxtapose the instructions we are
given with the text from the stories on my

Instagram feed and I am going to make
a political point about the fucked
interconnectedness of wellness and white

supremacy lines like

 

2
                             if you like to work hard
choose the springs at the high end of the suggested
settings and if you need to you can reduce

them halfway through the exercise please remember
you should never feel any pain if you do stop
straight away while talks of ceasefire remain

inconclusive Israel is invading Rafah offering hug
a tree here’s what you need to know bomb kills at least
twelve people including children at two displacement

camps in eastern Congo grit happens it’s hell
week three hours from Auckland Discover New
Caledonia back on the menu queen olives t zone tight all

eyes on Rafah the people of Gaza cannot wait they have
nowhere else to go hug the moon the weather is
grim but we’ll still do poetry lick your toe and wave 

it around a bit goodbye to dopamine addiction
with microlearning get the t-shirt springs women one to one
and a half men one and a half to two

 

3
over soy flat whites we agree we busy
our bodies to shush our minds our momentum
has taken over we google Kathleen

Stanford Grant we discuss our complex apocalypse
composting systems for entitled white men and their nice
white lady friends because compost is better for the planet

than setting them on fire in a big bin and sitting
on the lid smoking we have put a lot of thought into this
how we would watch them break

down under a sprinkling of tino rangatiratanga equity and drag
queen story times but this is a long term project and in
the meantime we consider who we would smash first with our

plough refined guns and the answer is always
the patriarchy we say it rolling our eyes in our heads on
our bodies that we are wresting from their control

we say it like it’s a joke

 

4
                     Lying on your back
on the reformer with your feet on the foot bar take
the hand straps and take the arms straight

up to the ceiling tabletop position imprinted
spine to make it easier make your teardrops smaller
t zone tight exhale now reverse your

teardrops direction change the way the world
works out pull the ribs to the hips inhale keep
going returning back down curl up exhale

 

5
I cannot write a poem about Pilates

 

6
tho I have been writing this one
in the shower where I usually
write my PhD and in bed at night where I am

supposed to be doing sleep and
behind my eyes where the tears live
last week I got to hang with both

my grown up children and we walked safe down
a safe street my counsellor thinks
it’s a good idea to give the news a break

Liz Breslin
from show you’re working out, Dead Bird Books, 2025

Will

30 September 2025

 

1.
It’s simple, this word, it implies
            future
            intention
            wish

We say it with ease
            I will see you later
            He will get through
            We will be there
            We will be there

We say it quick, this confident contraction
            I’ll see
            He’ll get
            We’ll be
            We’ll be

2.
Today, I listened to the will of a young girl
written in June after two missiles struck her house
she was pulled, then, with her brother Ahmed, from underneath rubble
their survival a miracle

Three months later, another strike
and now her will carries across a room with neatly ordered seats
this purposeful body built
from the rubble of 1945, willing
security, and peace

The UN turns 80 this year
Rasha was 10

3.
I read the UN charter, the opening article underscoring
collective will
               future
               intention
               wish

A poem is voice, is protest, is resistance
and shouldn’t these lines also be said
in sustained and repeated rhythm: 

              a call for collective measures
             for the prevention and removal
             of threats
             to the peace 

Rasha, the girl who died today, wrote in her singular voice
            My will: If I become a martyr or pass away, please
            do not cry for me, because your tears cause me pain. 

Rasha, the girl who died today, asked for her clothes, her things, her allowance
her stories and notebooks to be given
to other children: Ahmed, Rahaf, Sara, Lana, Betur

In Gaza, schools are makeshift emergency
centres, shelters for too many
they are no longer
places for futures

In Gaza, the future is the question
– and we must ask it:
            What will become of the children?

4.
Rasha wrote in a single moment
of determination
             and grace
her will a statement for future specific use:
            And please do not yell at my brother Ahmed
            Please follow these wishes
clarity, in terror, her words read to us and recorded
because she died today

Rasha’s will is voice, is protest, is resistance
            a call for collective measures
            for the prevention and removal
            of threats
            to the peace

5.
We call children wilful when we mean stubborn, headstrong
            even spoiled
but what of a child living in a ruined world|
where your will is all you have
a world with no sense of
            future

In Rasha’s world survival was
            intention
and caring for her brother was her last
            wish

6.
And what of our easy forward-looking phrases
amid Rasha’s rubble and burning skies, the burden of meaning:
           I will see you later
          He will get through

And what of the document written 80 years ago

And what of the future, the imperative
call for collective measures
         We will be there
         We will be there

 

Michelle Elvy
After hearing a speech delivered by Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency room physician from Chicago here

Gaza

This walking up and down
will only wear a hole in the carpet
It will not stop the murder 
It will not shame these men
whose grannies wear
brands on their arms
These men do not indulge in
rug-depleting reflection.
They scheme brazenly
they say wrong is right
they say black is white
their grifted arms
rain down grief 
Do they not see 
that the world is mourning?
Where is the umpire?
The one who calls time?

Jan Farr

Child
—Khan Younis, Gaza

I and a kinder world would address you Aisha |
Dalia | Salma but you are unrecognisable, Child.

Forgive me. I do not know—believe me, I have
searched, but could not find—your name. I turn

to my book of William Blake paintings, understanding
I will not find you amongst its pages, nor any answers

to the questions I wake to each morning. Blake’s
Song of Los is where I’m heading—those faltering

rays of light, that dark mountain looming. I lay
my head on his cold stone altar, holler: I am sorry.

Child, I am sorry. I will do my best to paint you.
How else to sing your life from the distant safety

of my island in the South Pacific? But, of course,
we cannot restore what cannot be restored. I paint

nonetheless and at close of day kiss your brow,
Child. You are swaddled again in the white robes

of innocence—silver and gold the ground that held
you where you fell, gold and blue the firmament.

Only when I lay my brushes down do I notice
your left hand folded in the position of a mudra,

thumb and forefinger lightly touching to form
a mandorla, palm turned outward as if in blessing.

Blake’s Los urged us to revolution. It’s the revolution
of keening I hear this evening in the softly falling rain.

Claire Beynon
2025

Gaza

We shriek and scream and holler and shout and
sign petitions and hold placards and boycott and
demand peace and listen to Gaza and weep

And our shrieks and screams and hollers and shouts
our petitions and placards and boycotts
our demands for peace and words and tears for Gaza

fall upon deaf ears

The borders are blocked food is scarce
aid is stopped displaced families are murdered
hospitals targeted under extensive ground operations

we are witnessing genocide

We will not stop shrieking and screaming
and hollering and shouting and signing petitions
and holding placards and boycotting and
demanding peace and listening to Gaza and weeping

we will not stop

Paula Green
4 am, May 19th 2025