Food as a weapon

My friend writes from Gaza 2025
….We have never begged for this help. It’s our shame.
Number one exporting strawberries and citrus.
They turned us into this …..

I watch
the sick, the disabled, the malnourished,
and children, walk forty-one kilometres
from the sea to the south.
A calculated death-march
to the distribution centre in Rafeh.
Famine is a weapon of mass destruction.

I hear
the sick, the disabled, the malnourished
and children, return
with nothing

I see
a family home turned
to rubble where eight
of nine children died,
a bombed hospital where their paediatrician
mother worked, without anaesthetic,
to remove bullets lodged in skulls and bodies.

I cry
as a six-year-old girl walks through fire
from a school, and tells the camera her mother
was martyred, as if she is telling the world
her mum’s gone to the shops
for flour again.

I say
nothing of this to my friend.
She is dreaming of olive oil and za’atar,
risking her life to send a message
while living with the grey stink of trinitrotoluene
and aluminium powder in the air
with little left to eat.

I pray

Sheila Hailstone
from potluck, Landing Press, 2025

From Aotearoa New Zealand, Sheila Hailstone sends poetry out into the world. Founder of Christchurch Women’s Toastmasters, winner of District 72 International & Humorous Speech Contests, she’s empowering women to find their voice one punchline at a time. She once scooped up first prize in a Flash Frontier international micro-fiction competition, because a few words can say enough. The author of many children’s stories, and a memoir, Dancing Around Cancer that’s funny and inspiring, and details her journey on the El Camino de Santiago. She was a CEO of a Not-For-Profit, a European Training Manager and recently a student at Hagley Writers Institute Ōtautahi. Because she believes learning never retires – even if she has.