Two New Poems by Robert Gibb

MOURNING THE DEATH OF A CHILD IN GAZA

Hind Rajab, 2018–2024

i.

This rubble was a house, a school, a hospital,
Was a well whose water slaked the stones,

Rubble a library, rubble a dome, was a street
Filled with children a block from the beach.

ii.

Who wouldn’t prefer stalls full of dried figs
And spices and brine-soaked olives

To a close-up of that car Hind Rajab
Was trapped inside, alone and frantic

When the tank opened fire? Prefer roses
And red anemones to the sight of her

Thrashing, Tel al-Hawa being shelled.
“The blood of children,” Neruda once wrote,

“ran simply, like children’s blood does,”
The tropes of poetry superfluous

In the face of a fact his poem insists
On facing and the world in which it fits.

iii.

Rubble a park, rubble an open-air market
Whose debris field fills the street.

NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

after Adorno

It must be winter, evening, since the lights
Are on already in the living room.
Since I’m not yet three it must be near
My bedtime, a motherless child,
Like in the lament, cared for by my godparents.
Tonight, instead of the usual storybook,
A boardgame lies open before us,
Its switchbacks sectioned like a sidewalk
From the front of Uncle Wiggily’s bungalow.
Five hops, or jumps, if you prefer,
And then look back to where you were.
I can still see that big top-hatted rabbit
Kicking up his heels on the front of the box,
His name the same as the game’s.
The version we’re playing was a gift
For their son on one of his birthdays,
Years before he joined the ranks of the dead
During the Second World War.
That’s him in uniform in the photograph
They’ve enshrined on their mantle,
His name the same as mine.
Uncle Wiggily goes ahead by ten.
Hope you get this card again.
To a child all history is ancient, antecedent,
And then gets filled in if given time.
This game, for instance, had its origin
In a series of children’s books written during
The First World War. One of the ones
They read back then before packing you
Off to bed, as though in childhood’s bungalow—
the mouse boy takes Uncle Wiggily ahead—
And then into that waiting world
In which the dead are orphaned.

Excerpted from Winter Fires: New and Selected Poems. Copyright ©2026 by Robert Gibbs. Used with permission of the publisher, Green Linden Press. All rights reserved.