These past days we have witnessed terror at its worst within Israel and Gaza. These past days we have been silenced by the noise of war, we have become marooned on this island of fear and foreboding. Over the past few days in the gruesome images of the bombed Al-Alhi hospital in Gaza one thought kept coming to me in the words “this hospital needs a hospital” I don’t know where these words are from. Did I read them somewhere, has someone written these words? I do not write poetry very often and never print any I have written but today is different. I will make myself vulnerable, not in any sense vulnerable like the lives in Israel or Palestine or Ukraine or Afghanistan, or Morocco or the border area of the USA to mention only a few places. I offer a few hurried words in response to the horror that has attempted to dismantle and destroy hope. Please pause and ponder with me but together let us not remain silent or idle in the task of peacemaking.
This Hospital Needs a Hospital.
I am struggling to breathe
the air so full of fear and fumes.
All those around and within me struggle to breathe
their lungs so full of fear and fury.
They have amputated my source of power
all those within me pray desperately to their source of power.
Over and above their hurried and harried prayers
sirens wail, bombs burst, horns blare.
My water has been turned off, not by some life-saving plumber,
instead by life denying politics,
offering only words and broken promises
over years, like tourniquets to all pipes of possibilities.
My heart is broken, my blood is spilt,
all my mending, like knots of string, undone.
Please wrap me in sheets and splints
Rush me to a hospital where my pain can be undone.
I am struggling to breathe,
and I have become more like hell than hope.
Take me quickly before all hope is undone
Please help me to breathe that others might live. Edward J. Thompson
Prayer:
Merciful God,
I cry to you, O Lord, for mercy for the many
who are held hostage by the brutality of terrorists.
Merciful God,
I cry to you, O Lord, for hope for the many
who walk amidst despair and death.
Merciful God,
I cry to you, O Lord, to work a miracle called peace,
a miracle called hope, and a miracle called love.
Might this miracle begin within me.
Merciful God I don’t know what words to call upon as
I call upon you. In silence
please be the giver of new breath within me, new hope around me. Amen.
Prayers, Poems, and Christian Ponderings 
In the darkness of the news, my mind brings light as I think of a friend who is a renowned peace journalist working at the UNO in Geneva. As a conscientious objector in the early 1970s he was sent from his home in Germany to serve a year as a teacher’s assistant in a Christian school for special needs children where I was experiencing my first year as a teacher. Throughout our friendship over the years I have learned from him time and again that Peacemakers allow themselves to be vulnerable, to take risks, to express anguish, to acknowledge facts, to recover from the exhaustion of reality and to be relentless in denying the loss of hope.
You are doing each of these in your post today. Well done.
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