Cutlines for a Photo of Famine

Chris Ellery

June 8, 2025

“Palestinians in Gaza were still waiting for aid to arrive, U.N. officials said,

two days after the Israeli government said it had lifted

an 11-week-old blockade that has brought the Palestinian

enclave to the brink of famine.”

Reuters, 21 May 2025

Shown here arriving in the Gaza Strip

the bastard child of Strife. At once both male

and female, old and young. Incarnate want,

a shriveled chickpea, sad and dry. Privation

inside a dusty hide stretched tight and stitched

onto a scaffolding of sticks. Where its shadow

falls between the sun and life, the vines

will not require more pruning, gardens fail,

and fattened flocks flee to the winter hills.

Insatiable vultures fly away in disgust

from its pitiful ribs—more meat on a greasy rag,

more protein in a warlord’s mercy. No

sane country wishes for this vagabond,

less loved than Pharaoh’s vermin, more despised

than all the well-fed mice of his granaries.

Hate is its invitation, and when it comes,

it comes to stay. It forages burned fields.

It reaps the rubble of cities bombed and razed.

It feasts from the larder of deathcamps.

It makes its bed in waiting graves. Too weak

to wail, it stares at pity as at unreal bread.

Unlike a lost, emaciated cat or dog,

some starving stray, kindness will not make

it stay, and feeding it drives it away.

Chris Ellery is the author of The Big Mosque of Mercy, a collection of poems based on travels in the Middle East, including Israel and Palestine. His essay "A Boy of Bethany" received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction.