POET ON ASSIGNMENT
For the whole story of this project, read the introduction, "A Poet On Assignment" here.
As part of my work, I contacted organizations and activist leaders I respected and asked them what kinds of poems they needed me to be writing. Sometime during the year after 9/11 Barbara Lubin and Penny Rosenwasser of the Middle East Children's Alliance asked me to write a poem for an event commemorating the suffering of children on all side of the conflict in Palestine/Israel. "Memorial" was the result.
Below, you can also listen to a recording of my poem, "Wings," a response to persistent challenges to my identity as a Jew, because of my support for Palestinian sovereignty, I believe that the security of all the people of Palestine/Israel lies in sharing the natural resources of the land, and all the rights to self-determination, civil liberties, and participatory democracy that all humans deserve. As a Puerto Rican woman, a colonial subject from an occupied country, I have a visceral connection to the suffering of the Palestinian people, and many of the weapons used against them by the Israeli military were tested on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, where the cancer rate is 25% higher than on mainland Puerto Rico. As an Ashkenazi Jew, with close relatives who were murdered by the Nazis in the Ukraine, I understand the drive to create a Jewish controlled state, but I don't share it. No people's liberation or safety can ever depend on dispossessing and attacking another people. In "Wings" I speak from both sides of my heart, with hope for all the people of that land.
Below, you can also listen to a recording of my poem, "Wings," a response to persistent challenges to my identity as a Jew, because of my support for Palestinian sovereignty, I believe that the security of all the people of Palestine/Israel lies in sharing the natural resources of the land, and all the rights to self-determination, civil liberties, and participatory democracy that all humans deserve. As a Puerto Rican woman, a colonial subject from an occupied country, I have a visceral connection to the suffering of the Palestinian people, and many of the weapons used against them by the Israeli military were tested on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, where the cancer rate is 25% higher than on mainland Puerto Rico. As an Ashkenazi Jew, with close relatives who were murdered by the Nazis in the Ukraine, I understand the drive to create a Jewish controlled state, but I don't share it. No people's liberation or safety can ever depend on dispossessing and attacking another people. In "Wings" I speak from both sides of my heart, with hope for all the people of that land.
Memorial
Yazer, my grandmother's village in Kherson, Ukraine.
In my grandmother's village there were no olive groves.
When the soldiers came, it was through fields of wheat
that the children ran, and my young cousins bloomed
like a sudden crop of red poppies among the pale stalks. May, 1942.
Among the crimes of war, what a tiny handful of deaths that was,
nineteen children of Israelovka, murdered by Ukrainian men
in a wheat field, on a summer day, their eyes open, looking,
the way children look.
I carry their wide gazes like a pocketful of pebbles,
small stones of grief snatched from an avalanche of suffering.
But my cousins keep multiplying on the stony ground,
while crazed men, hoarse from shouting at each other
pretend it is safety they are buying in the marketplace of slaughter.
My cousins lie in bruised heaps like roughly handled plums,
shatter on ordinary street corners, are shot, just like that,
simply for being, bleed to death slowly, thirsty, barricaded from help.
My throat fills with the cries of Rivka, Avram, Gitl
falling in the blonde grass of more than half a century ago,
wide eyes gazing across time, watching their own deaths repeated,
their anguished voices calling help them! and seeing stones
in the eyes of their could have been sons, the same brutal gestures
the same crumpled dress, stained shirt, small corpse.
Shake out the pebbles from your pockets, they tell me. Grief is grief.
The earth is littered with it. Each child lying in her blood
is a universe ended. Hassan, Salah, Jameel.
They were galaxies that will not return.
Hope is always ridiculous, say the murdered children.
Don't be reasonable anymore, they shout, angrily.
Don't just stand there grieving.
Your heart is still beating.
it's not too late.
©2001 Aurora Levins Morales
When the soldiers came, it was through fields of wheat
that the children ran, and my young cousins bloomed
like a sudden crop of red poppies among the pale stalks. May, 1942.
Among the crimes of war, what a tiny handful of deaths that was,
nineteen children of Israelovka, murdered by Ukrainian men
in a wheat field, on a summer day, their eyes open, looking,
the way children look.
I carry their wide gazes like a pocketful of pebbles,
small stones of grief snatched from an avalanche of suffering.
But my cousins keep multiplying on the stony ground,
while crazed men, hoarse from shouting at each other
pretend it is safety they are buying in the marketplace of slaughter.
My cousins lie in bruised heaps like roughly handled plums,
shatter on ordinary street corners, are shot, just like that,
simply for being, bleed to death slowly, thirsty, barricaded from help.
My throat fills with the cries of Rivka, Avram, Gitl
falling in the blonde grass of more than half a century ago,
wide eyes gazing across time, watching their own deaths repeated,
their anguished voices calling help them! and seeing stones
in the eyes of their could have been sons, the same brutal gestures
the same crumpled dress, stained shirt, small corpse.
Shake out the pebbles from your pockets, they tell me. Grief is grief.
The earth is littered with it. Each child lying in her blood
is a universe ended. Hassan, Salah, Jameel.
They were galaxies that will not return.
Hope is always ridiculous, say the murdered children.
Don't be reasonable anymore, they shout, angrily.
Don't just stand there grieving.
Your heart is still beating.
it's not too late.
©2001 Aurora Levins Morales
Wings
This version was recorded for the poetry reading I organized in January 2009 in support of the Middle East Children's Alliance, during that winter's massive Israeli assault on Gaza.