FLYING KITES IN GAZA

When kites fly

across blue skies

and border divides,

Gaza and Israel unite.

We make the kites,

We fly the kites, 

over the wells of hate.

Our borders are planks of wood -

We carve the sails,

We choose the colours for the tails

in ribbons of orange and red

and green -

We speak across the steel.

When we fly kites

across blue skies,

Gaza and Israel unite.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2011

I wrote this poem a year and a half ago in response to the Dispatches documentary on the children of Gaza. Thousands of children flew kites over the Gaza strip in July 2011, claiming a new world record for most kites flown simultaneously. A competitive spirit was alive in the children, ready to sharpen their sails against their Israeli kite fighters. The poem feels so naive, so childish, in the face of what appears to be a systematic genocide of the people of a tiny strip of land. But the voice is accurate - the kites were everything that day. Slogans were written on the kites calling on Israel to end the four year blockade, calling for peace. It is painful that children are supposedly always at the heart of ending or restraining a grown-up war. And yet no-one actually listens to children.