Prayer Poem: Return to Gaza

Holy Family placard. Image: ICN/JS

Dr Swee Ang, Catholic orthopaedic surgeon, author and founder of Medical Aid for Palestinians, writes:

My God, my God Why do You forsake Gaza?

The broken heart of Gaza cries out to you from the abyss

of darkness, death, despair and desolation.

Do you not hear the cries of the mothers

Weeping for their children

Bodies crushed under the rubble

Incinerated to ashes, torso torn apart

Eyes mingled with sand.

The orphans with no surviving parents and family

Too frighten to cry, too shaken to eat and hope

Will you gather them like a hen her chicks

Will you heal their trauma and their wounds

Give them love and a future?

This beautiful piece of coastal land was created by You

You blessed this land and made it

Awash with fishes and now with fuel oil

Planted it with olives, dates, grapes, and jasmine

With fruits vegetables and herbs, oranges and lemons

With the fairest and most fragrant flowers in the Levant

Where peacocks, doves and sunbirds

Dance and sing in harmony and in sequence.

Where food is plenty on land and in the sea.

The land on which the indigenous people live for millennia

Where civilisation, culture and trade flourished for millennia

Enriched by respect, tolerance, generosity and hospitality

Where the children of Ismail and Isaac lived under Your wing.

Now you have allowed it to be laid waste

Death, desolation, and despair through massacres

Manmade hunger, famine and disease

Have decimated the natives of this land.

I have called for those who murdered tens of thousands innocent

To face Your judgement for genocide and obliteration of the land

I have pleaded with you to spare the lives of the defenceless.

I bring before You Your own promise that You will honour

Your pledge to Hagar to save and prosper the descendants of Ismail

Do You remember opening the spring of life for them

Telling them that their descendants will always live on this land?

Almighty God, our hearts are dying, there are no tears left

Hope is faltering, and words are failing

We know the hearts of kings and rulers are in Your hands

And You direct them in the way You desire.

Take away their hearts of stone

Give them new human hearts, hearts of flesh and compassion

Let Gaza live and rescue humanity from this abyss.

Merciful and compassionate and loving God so we pray.

Amen

Dr Swee Ang, 1 June 2025