#05december2024

They carved a map from flesh and stone, lines jagged as shattered glass, shores bruised with the weight of warships. The sea speaks here, a tongue of sorrow, its waves erasing dreams etched by hands calloused from exile.

In Gaza, the olive trees are storytellers, roots tangled with histories unsaid, branches reaching for a sun blocked by steel and ordinance. This is no land of silence— it sings with the pulse of resistance, its breath heavy with the scent of orange blossoms and the char of smoldering homes.

Here, walls are built not to hold, but to sever— the river from its course, the child from his kite, the farmer from his fields.

But Gaza does not kneel. Its streets chant names of the fallen, its skies burn with unsurrendered dreams. Every brick, a testament. Every scar, a signature. This city speaks the language of survival to a world that feigns deafness.

They call this siege. We call it a refusal to forget. Here, stones become weapons, hands become prayers, and each dawn rises with an unbroken oath: Gaza will not die.

They bomb, and Gaza rebuilds. They steal, and Gaza reclaims. They burn, and Gaza rises, a phoenix clothed in ash and light.

This is not martyrdom. This is life grasped from the jaws of annihilation. This is the story they cannot erase, written in the blood of those who refuse to vanish from the map.

Gaza, the beating heart of a people— a land where hope and defiance grow stronger than the walls that try to contain it.

~ Submitted Prompt

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Gaza, where the waves whisper of exile, their foam heavy with memory, their rhythm a requiem for olive groves uprooted, their salt stinging wounds older than the maps drawn to erase you.

Your streets, woven with the echoes of footsteps that marched through history— refugees fleeing, generations resisting, voices swallowed by the rubble of homes demolished at dawn.

Here, the sky is not the promise of rain, but the drone of occupation’s machinery, an iron dome that seals dreams beneath its shadow. Yet still, the kites fly, a testament that even children can turn the wind into rebellion.

O Gaza, you are a fragment of an unbroken struggle, a scar carved into the flesh of a hundred years, a mosaic pieced together from dispossession and resilience. The siege encircles you, but does not silence you— your breath defies the noose of blockade.

They write your story in the language of conquest, call you barren, call you terror, call you forgotten. But you are the keeper of keys, the cradle of return, a history they cannot burn.

You are a lesson etched in stone, a litany of names whispered to the sea, a child clutching a book written in the ink of endurance.

O Gaza, even your grief carries seeds. From the rubble rises a girl, her hands full of poetry and soil, her voice a homeland reborn.

For what is Gaza, if not a witness to the century’s lie? What is Gaza, if not the pulse of a people who refuse to surrender their song to silence?

Let the ink of Finkelstein and Khalidi merge with Darwish’s flame, to etch your story in the marrow of time. For you, Gaza, are not a martyr, but the fire that reminds the world it has a conscience yet to claim.

~ Submitted Prompt

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