Letter To A Poet In Gaza

There is one moon
There is still bread
There are photographs
of who you were before
this madness
buried under rubble
There are roses and life
Life!
There is the laughter of a child
But in war what do you have?
There is no birdsong,
only a cage,
only this prison,
only the camps
To survive you write
You must!
You have poems and poetry,
the ability to write,
and that must be enough,
sufficient in a sense
to keep on going,
to keep on living,
to keep on breathing
It must
But one thing I wanted
to ask you is this
Do you still smile?