By Vince Mills

Spring

I see the apple tree
Already has a fuzz of growth
Like the stubble on that broken face
They pulled from under Gazan rubble
And laid beside his mangled family.

And what will grow in Gaza now?
Crushed watermelons, olives, aubergines
Turn obscenely like the corpses of their martyred growers
Churned into soil made barren
By a lust for others’ land.

Summer

Glasgow knows it’s summer now
The rain is warm in June.
But the old joke dies
Cold on my lips

Because the sun,
A blinding promise
In the spring, has vanished
Like the talk of peace.

In Deir Al Balah children
Trudge through puddled sewage
In stifling heat looking for a place to shit.
There is nowhere to wash

So Cholera soon will take its prey
Consuming little ones
The bombs have missed.
Long before the Autumn harvest.

Autumn

Autumn was not gentle here
Storm Babet blew what apples from the trees
Were left, to rot in ditches.

The rain, relentless
Scoured the land
Of mellow fruitfulness.

And in bomb soaked Jabalia
Fatima was crushed beneath
A hurricane of concrete.

A millstone in an olive press
Rubble squeezed the life
From Palestine.

Winter

When winter came
In Glasgow
Snow, shroud white

Flurried and buried
Cherished plants
And places.

Now you cannot tell
The myrtle from the gorse
They are transformed.

And in Khan Younis
Flakes of debris
Settled gently on the dead.

Now you cannot tell
The mother from the child
They are de-formed.

Vince Mills is co-secretary of Radical Options for Scotland and Europe (ROSE) and contributes poems to the Morning Star’s Thursday Poetry slot.