August 25th,2026

What The Wall Does Not Say 

But Must be Said

The Cultural Acceptance of Genocide 

Do not say no never, not here - 

Say Not Yet

a child's ribs make a kind of psalm now, if you know how to read them. each one a line. the skin gone thin as the paper i write on, stretched over a cage that used to hold a laugh. i have seen the photograph i cannot unsee — the arm no thicker than the wrist should be, the eyes too large for the face that is disappearing beneath them.

~

i keep looking for the place inside myself equipped to hold this and i do not find it. there is no chamber built for a mother measuring grains of rice against the hours her children have left to live. no room in me shaped for a name written in marker on a small arm, in case the arm is what remains to be identified. i built rooms for my own private ruin. i never built one for this.

~

somewhere the light that was supposed to reach every particle of matter got trapped behind a wall instead, and the wall was called a policy, and the policy was called necessary, and necessity is the oldest word tyrants use to make their hands look clean. blind law mistaking itself for justice. matter forgetting it was ever meant to carry light, until the forgetting becomes its own machine, grinding forward on the fuel of other people's children.

~

i have done my own inventory. i know the exact shape of what i once refused to see in myself — the excuses, the careful blindness, the years i called denial something gentler. i know that the moral muscle, unused, does not simply rest. it shrinks. it calcifies into an alibi. and i know the particular cruelty of people who have been wounded, learning to defend every wound the way they were once taught to defend it, even the wounds they now inflict on someone else's child.

~

there is a tent i keep trying to build in my own chest. wide enough to hold every people's grief without asking whose grief came first, whose was older, whose has more of history's blessing on it. not wide enough to hold the argument that any child's starving body is an acceptable price. i keep failing at the dimensions. i keep having to tear it down and build it larger, and still it is not large enough for what i am being asked to hold this year.

~

the mystics say the self must starve before it can see. i understand now that they meant only the private self — the small greedy one, the one that hoards its own certainty like a last ration. because there is another starving happening tonight that has nothing to do with seeing. it will not open anyone's eyes. it will close them. it is closing them right now, the smallest ones first, in rooms with no light left to forget.

~

i do not know what to do with a grief this size except to stop protecting myself from it. to look at the photograph again instead of scrolling past. to say the child's hunger was not a metaphor, was not a talking point, was a body, was hers, was real. to carry that into whatever amends are still mine to make — not comfortable ones, not private ones, the kind that cost something to say out loud.

~

somewhere tonight a wall still stands. somewhere behind it, a child who did not choose any of this is disappearing by the ounce. i do not have a psalm big enough. i only have the refusal to look away, and i offer it, knowing it is not enough, knowing i will have to offer it again tomorrow.