Poetry as an Antidote to Despair
In the Wake of October Seventh
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent ⟡ Marwān Makhkhūl Palestinian Israeli poet, b. 1979 It’s the first week of the new year. I’m sitting in front of the woodstove while outside a storm is brewing. Wind dances the evergreen branches with wild abandon. I want that aliveness to take me over too, to swirl through my body so I don’t ever become complacent. I sit here warm and dry by the fire with a cup of hot tea, feeling around for a way in – a way into the vast sea of language where I can let the current find me, let the waves carry me out to where the surface becomes a sheet of glass that perfectly reflects the sky; a way into the enormity of it all, where the agony of the world cannot consume me. Poetry has been a luminous thread woven through the changing seasons of my life, a way to contend with ideas and emotions that feel too big to metabolize and make sense of otherwise. It has stitched for me a life raft of immeasurable beauty, a white burial shroud, a billowing sail, a North Star. In these darkest of days, I need poetry more than ever. Now rain is falling, a hard rain, beating against the cold ground. I find an opening between the rain drops and slip through. When the veil lifts from your eyes and you see that there are no demons in this world, only humans, then there is no relief from the suffering, the suffering becomes an ocean and there is no shore. We watch our siblings— siblings, not demons— celebrate as our siblings are hurt and killed, and they do this because they are suffering and they want relief and we cannot cheer with them but nor can we wish them anything but relief, so we hesitate to extend the invitation for them to join us out here in the middle of the ocean of suffering from which there is no exit, but we extend it anyway: join us out here, siblings. Maybe together we will discover that being human also means having gills, shimmering fins, that maybe after all we can breathe better from within this ocean of salt water, and we will hold each other’s hands and kick our tails and follow the dead where they lead us. ⟡ Moriel Rothman-Zecher, b 1984 Jerusalem-born Jewish American novelist and poet, author of “Sadness is a White Bird” Every day since October 7th, 2023, I’ve been grappling with grief, overwhelm and often feelings of helplessness, even moments of pure rage. In the immediate wake of the horrific Hamas attack, I was in shock like so many others around the globe. I was afraid for my dear cousin, Rachael and her husband and three small children who had been living outside of Tel Aviv. I was drowning in worry for my handful of Israeli friends and for my Jewish American friends whose family members reside in Israel. I scanned the list of names of those who had been recovered from the scene of the Nova music festival in case someone I knew may have been among the dead, perhaps an international friend I hadn’t spoken to in ages or an old lover who had taken their last breath after dancing up the dawn. It was, afterall, an event I might have gravitated to myself in my travels in years past. It felt personal. I shed tears for the Israeli hostages and for their loved ones. Then, when Israel began it’s merciless attack on Gaza, I watched explosions swallow the stars followed by the sound of wailing and then darkness. Only darkness. So many bombs. I listened to reporters in crisp white shirts state matter-of-factly that all water and food and medicine had been cut off from an entire population. In those first few days, I couldn’t eat. I felt sick. Today is January 7th, 2024 – three months since the war began. The continual media barrage of atrocities unfolding in real time, the sheer scale of human suffering, has altered me. The rise of independent media along with social media has changed the landscape. Never before have we, in the West, had such a bird’s eye view into the hell of war. Every hour, more stories of human tragedy flood in, more pain, more death and ever more disbelief as Palestinian journalists on the ground document the deaths of their family members and, in some tragic cases, even unknowingly film their own final moments for all the world to see. It’s beyond what any human heart can hold and, yet, I feel compelled as an inhabitant of these times and as an American to not look away, to seek the truth and try to understand. The holidays were particularly surreal in our little town this year as the tall firs lining the main square glittered with thousands of tiny warm lights and the shop windows were dressed with festive garlands and fake snow. Meanwhile, children in Gaza were having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. At the few holiday parties I attended, conversation tended toward small talk. Unspoken phrases floated like ghosts above the platters of deviled eggs and sugar cookies. “It’s too complicated”. “I don’t do politics.” “But do you condemn Hamas?!”. I wanted someone, anyone, to talk to me like they knew a genocide was unfolding. The Earth is closing on us pushing us through the last passage and we tear off our limbs to pass through. The Earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. I wish the Earth was our mother so she'd be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry as mirrors. We saw the faces of those who will throw our children out of the window of this last space. Our star will hang up mirrors. Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh. We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. ⟡ Mahmoud Darwish, Beloved Palestinian poet, 1941-2008 My life here on the mountain anchors me in the routine of every day chores. This has been my saving grace in the midst of the chaos. I wake early to tend to the simple tasks of living off grid in the mountains. I gather kindling; I do the milking; I feed the chickens and, yet, all the while, I am grieving. Some evenings after the work of the day is done, I take a bath and read poetry by candlight. We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if traveling were the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees. ⟡ Mahmoud Darwish Translation from the Arabic by Abdullah Al-Udhari Where I feel myself hardening, even a fragment of a poem can draw me into a mythic space, an open field where sorrow can breathe. I step out of the bath, out of the shadows and lean into the moonlight streaming through the open window, my lungs filling with the scent of pine needles and damp earth. This secret garden of melancholy is mine and mine alone. What has time produced? What have the tyrants done with the earth? And this river of women dressed in black, where does it flow to? ⟡ Najwan Darwish, Palestian poet, b. 1978 Fragment from "Exhausted on the Cross" Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid Poetry is a way picking wings out of the ashes and stitching them back together. As American writer Audre Lorde put it, "Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change." A wise person in my life once told me to write about what I know. I often recall that advice when I feel at a loss for words. Lately though, I am adrift. What I thought I knew is unravelling. I stack letters onto the page but the meaning falls through them like grains of sand. An hourglass. What I really want is to make time roll backwards to before 12 year old Dunia who had lost her entire family only weeks before – Dunia who wanted to grow up to be a doctor – Dunia who was killed in a hospital bed when an IDF tank-fired shell struck her head. As the pendulum on the antique Swedish clock above my grandmother’s mantle in my memory swings to and fro with rhythmic indifference, all I know for sure is this fathomless longing for the children of war to be given back their childhood.
In the 13th century, the beloved Persian poet, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, wrote, "Forgiveness is the fragrance flowers give when they are crushed". If I can let my heart break over and over again will it keep me from bitterness? Just when it all feels to heavy to bear, I discover that someone along the way has left a poem like a love notes for me to find.... Admit it, you have wings, vast and crystal, like mine, like mine. You have sweat, dark and salty, like mine, like mine. You have secrets silently singing in your blood, like mine, like mine. Don’t pretend that earth is not one family. Don’t pretend we never hung from the same branch. Don’t pretend we do not ripen on each other’s breath. Don’t pretend we didn’t come here to forgive. ⟡ Alfred K. LaMotte, from his poem "Ancestry" American poet, interfaith chaplain, religion studies professor and meditation teacher I am not Palestinian by birth but I have come to identify with the the struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation. Delving into the rich tapestry of both Palestinian and Jewish poetry in recent weeks, I understand how grief and resilience can grow on the same stem, how the burning ache to be free can seep through the page and bloom like a blood red rose in the desert of Negev. The strong and beautiful spirit of a people in the face of forceable displacement and 75 years of ongoing brutal occupation has ignited a fire deep in me. It is a love story that has forever changed me. Imagine centuries cradled in the lap of the land until the native grasses are woven through your long hair and the lines in your palms map the path down to the ancient well where your grandmothers filled their waterskins made of soft goat hide. Imagine the pain of being severed from her, your Mother, your homeland that has held you. Imagine that your Mother longs for you too, imagine her pain as the blood of all those you love is spilled, seeping into her every crevice. Poetry as a necessary means of survival has deep unbreakable roots throughout all cultures across time. Poetry is a catharsis, a tonic, an anodyne. It takes the bitter and transmutes it. Poetry is wild medicine. Even the best poetry doesn't take the pain away but it can be a balm for the wounds that will not heal. Enough for me to lie in the earth, to be buried in her, to sink meltingly into her fecund soil, to vanish ... only to spring forth like a flower brightening the play of my countrymen's children. Enough for me to remain in my native soil's embrace, to be as close as a handful of dirt, a sprig of grass, a wildflower. ⟡ Fadwa Tuqan, 1917-2003 Sometimes referred to as the "Poet of Palestine", known for her representations of resistance to Israeli occupation in contemporary Arab poetry
For the lucky ones, history is written in ink, for others only in blood. Refaat Alareer was a Palestinian writer, scholar, father and professor of literature in Gaza who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023. He was just 45 years old. Learning of his legacy and discovering his writing has been such a gift. “Writing is a testimony," he wrote, "a memory that outlives any human experience and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival and of hope. “ This poem he shared only days before his death: If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze – and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself – sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale. It is raining even harder now. Another refugee camp was hit in Gaza today, another hospital. An elementary school. I want to run outside and stand barefoot in the swollen ice cold creek and scream until hot tears run down my cheeks and I remember from the fierce water flowing how to sing. Maybe if I tend the kind of stillness that makes bones grow roots and allows the bees to dream honey into being, the kind of silence that causes petals to open out of the abyss of despair. Maybe then... A great star will fall in my lap — let us keep watch all night, pray in the tongues which are carved like harps. Let us make peace with the night — so much God overflows. Our hearts are children who wish to rest sweetly weary. And our lips long to kiss — why do you hesitate ? Doesn’t my heart verge upon yours. Your blood turns my cheeks red. Let us make peace tonight — heart to heart, we shall not die. A great star will fall in my lap. ⟡ Else Lasker-Schüler, 1869-1945 “Atonement” from a collection of poems entitled, “A Star in My Forehead” I have carried this book of poems around for so many years, it’s water stained, a few of the pages are torn and the edges are bent upward. I’m not sure where I even found it to begin with. On the back cover it calls the poems contained within “small red fires of passion in a time of total darkness” Lasker-Schüler was a German Jew who escaped the Holocaust by emmigrating to Zürich and then ended up and living out the last 6 years of her life in Jerusalem. What I know for sure is that we are all indigenous to the space of the heart that poetry guides us home to. And none of us are truly free until all of us are free. Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet and resident of Gaza, author of “Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear”, wrote on his Facebook page, “When you realize that you fail to feel the way others do, try to read some poerty. Poetry may, and it now should, help you regain some humanity that was taken from you.” The wind blows the pollen in the night through ruins of fields and homes. Earth shivers with love, with the pain of giving birth ⟡ Fadwa Tuqan So come now, my loves, the hour is late and the world is on fire. Let us swim out into the numinous and float there awhile ... and then return to tell about it.
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thanks for the journey.
Thank you. I love reading your words and those of these poets and letting them in to connect me to others’ similar grief if nothing else. And if we can still perceive beauty in the midst of true hell, there is one vital thing that hasn’t been lost.