Poetry Against War - collaboration with poet Mark Meekers

Rainbow Rebels partners with renowned poet Mark Meekers in an unprecedented collaboration, showcasing a series of raw, heartbreaking poems to raise awareness about the war in Gaza.     

Rainbow Rebels presents the "Juice Love Not War" collection. From vibrant tees to cozy hoodies, each piece encourages you to ‘juice’ love and harmony over conflict and make the world a better place, one fashionable step at a time!

Mark Meekers is a Flemish poet, essayist, and novelist, recognized as the most awarded poet in the Dutch language area and one of Belgium’s most celebrated authors alongside Hugo Claus. He has a particular affinity for visual poetry, dedicating six out of his sixteen collections to the lives and works of visual artists like Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Constantin Meunier, and Eugeen Van Mieghem.

The below poems were translated from the original poems, in Dutch, written by Mark Meekers and hence could lack some of the subtleties the poet used in his Dutch version.

EXODUS

high above the ground, among the divine

stars: one malevolent, on the wings

of a warplane. progress

has shifted the rifle from one shoulder to another,

 

the inhumanity remains. the pilot

becomes a cold-blooded angel of death, casting

bombs and conscience aside. among hospital

rubble, a new human is born.

a child from a caesarean section is of noble birth.

 

survivors swallow a brief breath

in a stranglehold, receive humanitarian aid

and a sip of water unfit for a dog.

they are shot off the beach,

 

driven southward in slave convoys,

blown into the desert like grains of sand.

when are the sleeping and mutilated

children enough currency for peace?

 

CHILD MURDER IN GAZA

Eye for an eye: blind with hate they see a

terrorist under every stone, in every ambulance,

every mihrab, driving them into the underworld,

killing every future in the womb.

 

the city trembles like Rotterdam and

Dresden once did. buildings fall from their pedestal.

the collateral damage is for the desperate citizens.

they scavenge like crabs in the rubble, with

bare hands, bleeding as they reach for

 

their mangled child. only the funeral

escapes the bombs. the murder

surpasses that of Bethlehem. funnels in the

streets can be muted, not those in the heart.

 

there is rust on a biblical doctrine from the

Iron Age. the Enlightenment is a snuffed

candle. God, may these degenerate

gentlemen never set foot on solid ground again.

 

BURNING ISSUE

I am not an angel of the last judgment

who weighs evil against lesser evil

stars against stones. do not distinguish

between those who create god in their

own image and likeness and those formed from

 

a less fine clay. they speak in the name

of light and sow darkness open

the jaws of hell cut off the tongues

of all dialogue. their hatred hardens into

 

concrete walls. the barbed wire twisted

with stars of David. their harp falsely tuned

in the key of boundless discrimination.

the human butchers have more respect

 

for animals than for citizens trapped.

here no rosary, lamentation

or bullet helps. in the body bags white as white

phosphorus, humanity is buried:

ten thousand times.