Collateral Damage

Chris Ellery

January 5, 2025

We argued today 

about Israel and Gaza,

about security and justification,

about occupation

and the web of history

and the long burden 

of ethnic identity

and what it means to say

a nation has a right

to exist,

about the strain and necessity 

of moral choice

in this moment and every moment

and what moral choice signifies

to men and women and kids 

on the ground

and to the soldiers and gravediggers

doing the dirty work 

and to the doctors with not enough

bandages, medicines, or sleep

and to the dying, the doomed, 

and the already dead.

Our argument solved nothing, 

eased no one’s pain, 

and we left each other feeling like

the two hot ends of a cut electric

wire or ruptured tendon

or broken bone, jagged, 

disconnected, incomplete, inflamed,

wondering will the pain ever end, 

will we ever really mend, 

will we walk without a limp,

will that old current 

that flowed between us

ever light the world

again?

Chris Ellery is the author of The Big Mosque of Mercy, a collection of poems based on his residence in Syria and extensive travels in the Middle East. His most recent book of poems is One Like Silence.