Skywriting for the dead

A poem for the pilots of Israel

There is a symmetry that genocidal antisemites are being hammered by the descendants of Holocaust survivors. I was feeling lyrical and recently I have been reading a lot of Seamus Heaney.

A June sky, cracked open wide,

tongues of steel blossom where figs grow.

Bitter root in a bitter grove,

chanting death,

wound tight in martyr’s shroud,

naming the Jew, the child, the elder,

for ash and silence.

But hear—

how thunder comes not from Sinai now,

but from wings forged in exile’s furnace,

piloted by heirs of barbed-wire ghosts,

who once scrawled names in soot

on the walls of a deathless winter.

Yad Vashem—

not stone alone, but memory in motion.

Not just a hall of names,

but names written now

in contrails across a hostile sky.

A name, and a flame.

Mothers of Warsaw,

fathers of Lodz and Lublin,

your blood, no longer led like lambs—

it soars, fire-wheeling

through the oil-choked air of Isfahan.

The furnace reversed:

not to burn flesh,

but to cauterise hatred.

Tell me—

is this not poetry’s unwanted retribution?

To survive,

to defend,

to refuse erasure not with psalms alone

but with the crackling pulse of avionics

and a heart hard-learned in October grief.

So here we are—

the living counterweight to prophecy,

dropping not leaflets

but lightning

onto those who would finish

what Pharaoh and Führer

left undone.

And still,

the scroll is unrolled—

Not erasure,

but testament.

A jet trail becomes scripture—

“Never again”

written right to left,

in the alphabet of survival.