She asked,
How are you?
I said,
Trying to stay sane.
But a sentence keeps echoing through my veins:
Not every life matters.
No…
Not every life…Not every pain.

Tell me,
what part of the soul must die
for people in power
to hear:
“14,000 children might starve to death in 48 hours”
and still go to meetings,
sip coffee,
pose for photos,
scroll past it?

How does the Earth keep spinning
when that sentence reaches the sky?

Nothing in my breath,
my blood,
my body,
can understand
how this is allowed.

And I wonder…
if I live twenty years more,
and they ask me,
as I once asked of history:
“How on earth did that happen?”
“Where were you?”

Will I say
We screamed until our lungs bled truth.
We wrote letters soaked in grief.
We marched and boycotted,
held signs,
lit candles,
and begged the world to see.

Will I say
We tried,
but the system shrugged.
We cared,
but power did not.
We loved too much,
but they loved money more

Or will I say
We didn’t just witness,
we refused to look away.
We turned grief into resistance,
and silence into thunder.
That we named every child lost,
not as casualty,
but as unforgivable theft.

That even as the world collapsed
in cowardice and greed,
we held the line
of what it means
to be
human.

No, not every life matters…

Some lives are mourned in prime time,
in headlines,
while others are footnotes
if mentioned at all.

As if being Palestinian
is already an accusation.
As if our death must come with explanation.
As if our grief
must pass inspection
before it’s allowed to speak.

But listen
the land beneath our feet
will remember.
The air we breathe
will carry the silence
or the chants.
The photos will testify
faces, marches, rubble,
all speaking of complicity
or solidarity.

The archive is being written
in real time.

So tell me…
where do you stand?