Dear Friends,
As a follow up to my three-part series, “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?”—which you can read as a single essay here—I wanted to share with you a poem of mine, “The People of Gaza Keep Dying,” that was recently published on New Verse News. I have revised this version only slightly. The poem’s backstory appears below.
The People In Gaza Keep Dying
“You don’t need overt bloodshed to cause significant violence that ends people’s lives. Many people will die unnecessary deaths due to deprivation.”
—Yara Asi, quoted by Maya Rosen in Jewish Currents, “The Epidemiological War on Gaza”
This morning on my daily walk
I met a long-haired shepherd
with ambiguous eyes.
I slowed my pace,
watched the dog’s walker
rein the animal’s curiosity in,
winding tightly around her hand
the tether we tell ourselves
protects people like me,
who believe all others
will of course welcome the friendship
we assume they assume we intend,
and in that moment, the rage
I thought I’d put behind me
at the words of the poet
whose book I was asked to review
sent its own tether out,
and I heard myself again
reading his lines aloud
as I sat some months ago
alone among my books,
confirming I’d not misread
his refusal of history,
the willful pleasure he took
in a loathing I disowned long ago,
no differently, I have no doubt,
than that neck-fettered dog,
under the right circumstances,
would disown its leash,
and perhaps its master as well.
I don’t remember much
about my own opportunity,
except that I was standing
in my sophomore dorm hallway
while a man from a country
I knew nothing about,
except that I knew nothing,
looked at me with disbelief.
“You really believe those mothers
love their sons so little
that they bring them into the world
just to make them martyrs?”
I had not said exactly that,
but it had been my meaning,
as its underlying hatred was,
in poem after poem,
the lie that poet embraced.
I started to ask if the dog was friendly,
but the woman spit out, “Come!”
and pulled him hard into the gutter,
so I let my question
sink back into silence,
which I’d thought at first
was how I should respond
to that poet’s betrayal
of this art that saved my life,
but then I wrote the review.
It’s in the world. I want to know
what difference it has made.
January 2, 2020 - January 10, 2024
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The Backstory
As you can see from the dates of composition, I began this poem almost exactly four years ago. I was at the time preparing to write the review I refer to, of Stephen Sher’s Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies, which, if you want, you can read here. The early drafts of my poem were not successful, however, largely because they focused on my feelings about the book, not on the feelings themselves, or, as Yeats would put it, on the struggle within myself those feelings represented.
When Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, I remembered the poem of Sher’s that my review focused on. Called “Bombing Gaza,” it appropriated in a really heinous way Abraham’s negotation with God over whether or not there were enough righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah for God to spare those two cities—a rhetoric that is, in fact, echoed in statements made by Israeli officials to the effect that there are no innocent people in Gaza. Remembering how Sher’s poem foreshadowed what is happening there today moved me to go back to my own poem, the result of which you see above.
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