Christopher Bernard will be reading at the Poets for Palestine SF Marathon Reading at Bird and Beckett Bookstore. For a donation of any amount to the Middle East Children’s Alliance, poets can come and read at any time at the store on October 14th, Indigenous People’s Day. Please feel welcome to sign up here or email poetsforpalestinesf@gmail.com to be scheduled.

A Day in October

A child holds his breath

like a frightened pet to his chest.

His eye peers through a hole

in the wall of his night room,

in the acid dust of siege

and cage of bone and blood,

in the code of an algorithm

governing AI

that has made the ineluctable

decision he shall die.

His eye, brown as honey,

watches you, intently.

It is like the eye in a castle wall

where hungry defenders await the burning

arrow vaulting through a sky

dark as velvet,

to break a mother’s shield

and wipe her tears with ashes

and build in pillars of fire

a school where future terrorists

(according to the omniscient

and infallible AI),

are learning, even now, their alphabet.

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist. His book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021 and was named one of 2021’s “Top 100 Indie Books.”