Deuteronomy 20: 16-18

You’ve no autonomy
under Deuteronomy;
it’s your obligation
to your tribal nation
to kill all Palestinians
so you don’t sin against
God, who’s neurotic.
Yes, Yahweh’s psychotic.
No escaping his wrath,
no path but the psychopath.

*****

For Christians and Jews who state (as Jesus did) that every reported command by God in the Torah / Old Testament must be obeyed, I ask their position on Deuteronomy 20. This contains the command for the complete genocide of the non-Jews living in the land which Moses claimed had been given to the Jews by God. (Note: not expulsion or enslavement of the people living there, but the death of all of them and their animals.) The reason? So that they don’t teach evil ways to the Jews:

16 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:
18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the Lord your God.

To the extent that fundamentalist Jews constitute a large percentage of the Israeli population and are influential in the national government, the Palestinian situation cannot be resolved until scriptural passages like this are dragged out into the open and examined and discussed: was that passage only for then, and things are different now? Or does the command to massacre non-Jews still hold for today’s Jews in “the Holy Land”?

This poem was first published in The HyperTexts, where Michael R. Burch maintains extensive collections of poetry related to both the Holocaust and the Nakba, the Palestinian situation.

Illustration: “Moses has the mature women and the male children of the Midianites killed” is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Michael R. Burch, ‘Suffer the Little Children’

for the children of Gaza

I saw the carnage . . . saw girl’s dreaming heads
blown to red atoms, and their dreams with them . . .

saw babies liquefied in burning beds
as, horrified, I heard their murderers’ phlegm . . .

I saw my mother stitch my shroud’s black hem,
for in that moment I was once of them . . .

I saw our Father’s eyes grow hard and bleak
to see his roses severed at the stem.

How could I fail to speak?

*****

Michael R. Burch writes: “Three decades ago, I began working with Jewish Holocaust survivors and other Jewish poets to publish translations of previously unpublished poems written in Polish and Yiddish by victims of the Holocaust. Some were written by children. In some cases the poems survived but the names of the poets did not. I considered it a sacred task and believed we were saying “Never again!” to any and all Holocausts. But in my discussions with my Jewish friends, it became apparent that “Never again!” did not apply to the Palestinians. When I asked questions about Israel’s brutal abuses of Palestinians and the theft of their land – armed robbery – my Jewish friends became defensive and told me, essentially, to shut up and never question Israel. Their sudden change in attitude convinced me that something was wrong, deeply wrong. I decided to research the subject independently, invested considerable time, and came to the conclusion that the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) is a Holocaust sans ovens, a modern Trail of Tears. And while my country, the United States, has opposed other Holocausts, it is funding this one and supplies Israel with terrible weapons that are being used to mass murder children and their mothers, fathers and families. I will continue to say “Never again!” to any and all Holocausts and invite readers to join me and do what they can to end and prevent such atrocities.”

‘Suffer the Little Children’ has been published by Art in Society (Germany), Pick Me Up Poetry, Jadaliyya (Egypt), The HyperTexts andMESPI (Middle East Studies Pedagogy Institute). According to Google the poem now appears on 462 web pages.

Michael R. Burch is an American poet who lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Beth, their son Jeremy, two outrageously spoiled puppies, and a talkative parakeet. Burch’s poems, translations, essays, articles, reviews, short stories, epigrams, quotes, puns, jokes and letters have appeared in hundreds of literary journals, newspapers and magazines. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts, a former columnist for the Nashville City Paper, and, according to Google’s rankings, a relevant online publisher of poems about the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Trail of Tears and the Palestinian Nakba. Burch’s poetry has been taught in high schools and universities, translated into 19 languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, set to music by 31 composers, and recited or otherwise employed in more than a hundred YouTube videos. To read the best poems of Mike Burch in his own opinion, with his comments, please click here: Michael R. Burch Best Poems.   

Photo: “Untermensch – Hannukah 2008 – Palestinian children killed by Israel in Gaza” by smallislander is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Short Poem: ‘Rainbow’

God made the rainbow as a sign
for post-Flood men to see.
The sign says, “I am Merciful–
and you better fucking agree.”

*****

According to the Book of Genesis, after God flooded the entire world He told the one surviving family: “I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.”

There are so many things to love in all this: the Noah’s Ark story, and the toys of it that delight children; the beauty of rainbows themselves; the alternative explanation that Irish leprechauns make rainbows to mark where they bury their gold; the Biblical suggestion that water droplets didn’t cause refraction of light before the Flood; the calculation that rain, to have flooded Mount Everest in 40 days, must have fallen at 29 feet per hour for that entire time… and above all the idea that God needed the rainbow to remind Him not to kill everyone whenever He gets angry.

But hey – rainbows are beautiful, at least we can all agree on that.

This poem was published in the most recent issue of Light.

“Noah’s Ark” by Svadilfari is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Why early abortion is no big deal

whitish material in petri dish
Tissue from five weeks of pregnancy to nine weeks. Photograph: MYA Network

What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks – in pictures. In 13 US states, abortion is banned even in the earliest stages of pregnancy. But we rarely see what such tissue really looks like.

The full article in The Guardian, with individual photos, is here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/pregnancy-weeks-abortion-tissue

In the Bible, abortion is not considered murder because life doesn’t begin until breath. There are even rules for how a priest can induce an abortion. Causing a woman to miscarry can be a crime, though, because it is a damage to her and a loss of her property.

Religion and Politics

It’s always sad to see a country sliding back from Science, Justice and Democracy, towards Religion, Corruption and Kleptocracy. Russia made that rapid turn when reforms failed in the aftermath of the Soviet Union; the US began that slow turn under Ronald Reagan, leading to the corruption of Donald Trump and the packing of the Supreme Court with justices hostile to the will of the American public.

The huge irony with the “religious right” taking away the right to abortion in the US after 50 years is that it is unjustified by the Bible that they are always quoting. Life, in the Bible, begins with the first breath. Abortion is used by priests as a test of marriage infidelity (Numbers 5:11–28). Jesus makes no mention of abortion other than to implicitly agree with the above passage, in saying that not one word of the Old Testament Law can be changed. (Because Jesus was a fundamentalist Jew, not a Christian, of course.)

The “cafeteria Christians“, on the other hand, decide that “Thou shalt not kill” applies to the unborn (ignoring the fact that priests are told in the Bible to cause an abortion when appropriate, and how to do it), while deciding to ignore a host of things that are termed “an abomination”, including:

Crucifixes… Deuteronomy 27:15 – “‘Cursed be the man who makes a carved or cast metal image, an abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.’ And all the people shall answer and say, ‘Amen.’

Bacon… Isaiah 66:17 – “Those who sanctify and purify themselves to go into the gardens, following one in the midst, eating pig’s flesh and the abomination and mice, shall come to an end together, declares the Lord.”

Statues of saints… Deuteronomy 29:17 – “And you have seen their detestable things, their idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold, which were among them.”

Shrimp and lobster… Leviticus 11:10-13 – “But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales, of the swarming creatures in the waters and of the living creatures that are in the waters, is detestable to you. You shall regard them as detestable; you shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall detest their carcasses. Everything in the waters that has not fins and scales is detestable to you.

Clothing of mixed fabrics… Leviticus 19:19 – “Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.”

Tattoos… Leviticus 19:28 – “And a cutting for the dead you will not make in your flesh, and writing marks you will not make on you; I am the Lord.”

All Christians are “Cafeteria Christians”, because Paul, abandoning strict Judaism in the name of a “new testament”, commands them to do things that Jesus implicitly forbids.

The US Supreme Court would be better off without any Christians on it, and a full separation of Church and State.

Poem by Marcus Bales: ‘Perhaps’

When Christians started out they had to find a place to hide,
For Romans were not pleasant to the Christians found outside;
They taxed the Christian buildings, and their jokes were rather snide
About the rude productions when the Passion Plays were plied.
But Christians turned the other cheek and counted up to ten —
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

The Romans built in marble and they carved in alabaster,
The Christians built in wood and lath, and covered it in plaster.
The Romans mocked inversion of the humble with the master,
And laughed at how the Christians stole their Christ from Zoroaster.
But through it all the Christians acted virtuously then —
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

But once the Christians got on top they went on the attack,
So long abused they thought they’d do their own abusing back.
Mean-spirited and mean, it’s Christian charity they lack,
And ever since they’ve warped their woof by talking trash and smack,
They’ve sought out cheats and pedophiles to be their clergymen.
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

L’envoi
The worse the Christians have it, why, the better they behave:
They’re rotten as the boss, but they are brilliant as the slave.
They ought to be reminded of their teachings now and then;
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

*****

Marcus Bales is one of the leading formalist poets writing today – he is a master of poetic form, from parodies of Kipling and Poe to the creation of his purely original work as in ‘Perhaps’. His collection “51 Poems” is available from Amazon.

Credit: The inside of a jail of the Spanish Inquisition, with a priest supervising his scribe while men and women are suspended from pulleys, tortured on the rack or burnt with torches. Etching.
Wellcome Collection.

The Bible says abortion is OK

Jesus never mentioned abortion, and the Bible never condemns it. That’s because according to the Bible, life doesn’t begin until the first breath is taken (Genesis 2:7).

Causing a pregnant woman to miscarry so that she loses the child is not considered an injury (Exodus 21:22-25).

If a pregnant woman is accused of adultery, the recommended way to seek proof is for a priest to abort the fetus (Numbers 5:11-31).

And God is constantly threatening to kill unborn fetuses (2 Kings 8:12, 2 Kings 15:16, Isaiah 13:18, Hosea 9:10-16, Hosea 13:16).

This puts anti-abortion activists in the same category as fundamentalists who wear clothing of mixed fibers, or eat shrimp, or eat bacon, or plant different types of seed in the same field, or a man who fails to marry his brother’s widow (and the Bible allows polygamy). They are all hypocritical, irreligious “cafeteria Christians”, picking and choosing what to accept and what to ignore.

Anti-abortion activists are anti-Bible. Life begins with the first breath. American “fundamentalists”, so-called Christians who don’t know what is in the Bible that they claim is God’s unchanging word, are linked to the Republican Party whose symbol, an elephant, can be appropriately modeled with a coat hanger…

Sonnet: ‘Fat-Shaming’

Gorging on food, an atavistic trait
useful, essential, in the paleolithic–
like a man’s lust for teenage girl as mate–
is one not needed now, shamed as horrific.
It’s healthy, though, to recognise such drives,
note where they came from, why they once were good:
these traits in which the primitive survives,
inbuilt components of our personhood.

It’s acting on them, though, that we deplore:
those who fuck teens and those who overfeed,
like those who steal, or lie, or start a war,
aren’t shamed for primitive desire, but deed–
like those who pray to gods, follow religions,
or skry the future from entrails of pigeons.

This poem is about a lot of things, but the punchline is: religion is an atavitic trait of humans, as useful as overeating in prehistoric times, and as counterproductive today.

About the poem itself: it’s not PC these days to even mention various issues, and I seem to have covered a lot of them in this sonnet. But it’s a decent enough Shakespearean sonnet (iambic pentameter, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, volta between the octave and sestet) and also a good enough expression of an opinion, so what is there to complain about? Originally published in that not-always-comfortable but always formal ‘The Road Not Taken – A Journal of Formal Poetry’. Thanks, Dr. Kathryn Jacobs!

If you like formal verse, you can find more in my formalverse.com blog.

“Young and Fat” by Tobyotter is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Sonnet: ‘The Fall of Rome’

Jesus, a preacher with fake miracles,
his “Sea” of Galilee just eight miles wide–
rebelling against Rome and crucified–
his failure clear (though words were lyrical)…
you’d think “Messiah” was satirical!
But epileptic Paul a chance descried
to shut out other gods and thoughts worldwide,
thus sealing up Rome’s vital spiracles.
So, building on apocalyptic fears,
the Jewish Jesus ends where Paul begins.
Scientists, artists, poets, engineers,
are suffocated as the new faith wins.
All progress is set back a thousand years.
The Roman Empire died for Jesus’ sins.

Belief is strange. Take Covid vaccination: two thirds of us believe it’s an effective way to save lives, one third of us believe it’s a dangerous and unscrupulous way to make money and control people. Virtually no one has actually done any research and analysis of the issue, we just listen to our preferred sources of information and the community we’re a part of.

Or take religion: for the most part, children raised in Christian families remain Christian believers all their lives, Muslims remain Muslim, Buddhists remain Buddhist, and so on. Which makes it all the more impressive when someone can radically change the belief structure that surrounds them. Kudos then to the epileptic Paul of Tarsus, who created a Jewish-Mithraist-polytheist mishmash that has lasted almost 2,000 years. Pity about the Roman Empire, though.

This happily Petrarchan sonnet (iambic pentameter, and rhyming ABBAABBA CDCDCD) of mine was originally published in Rat’s Ass Review, where respectfulness and respectability are not required. Thanks, Roderick Bates! (More of my poetry is at http://formalverse.com)

“Darkness Falls in Rome” by Storm Crypt is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0