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Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
P.ublished 7th March 2026
arts

Poem Of The Week: Gaza By Bill Manhire

Gaza

The dead boy tries to open his eyes.
He wants to see the world he is leaving.
But there is nothing to see here,
nothing and nothing, and anyway he is gone.
His parents held him while he died
but they are both dead, too.
Or he held them, no one remembers.


Image by Hosny Salah from Pixabay
Image by Hosny Salah from Pixabay
Philip Larkin’s fear of annihilation in death, a vision of the all-consuming nothingness that, over time, expunges even memory of the dead, is tangentially consonant with the philosophical tone of Bill Manhire’s harrowingly focused meditation on Gaza’s recent history. For here, another form of erasure is divulged: an individual death in a charnel house of obliteration, the dead boy is nameless, subsumed into the grey, flattened landscape as if by a bulldozer, rendered, as if interchangeably, with his parents so that temporal and spatial distinctions are dislocated until memory itself succumbs to the passage of time – ‘no one remembers’.

The passage of this fine, almost indescribably moving poem is an act of gathering denial, mirroring the inexorability of the truths of war in accretions of gradual separation: disordering of perception, confusion of the immediate past and the present, reiteration of negatives like the tolling of a discordant bell. Manhire’s language extrudes pain through clear-eyed simplicity; when the razed city yields to a paradise of golf courses and swimming pools, will the echoes of silenced Palestinian voices sustain?


‘Gaza’ is taken from Lyrical Ballads, published by Carcanet (2026), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher and the author.

More information here.

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