Call for Water

Vengeance is its own fire.

I’ve found it hard to concentrate on this newsletter these last many days. First, there was the point-blank brutality of the Hamas attack, the sudden, bloody frenzy of it. But before I could even comprehend that horror, there came the retaliation: mechanized, industrial, images of people ghosted in dust clambering through rubble carrying crumpled bodies. It’s being called Israel’s 911, and one can understand the comparison, yet it’s Gaza that looks like ground zero.

And there is the stunning verbiage coming from people of power. “Finish them,” seethed Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley. “We are fighting human animals, and act accordingly,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Biden, rather than calling for restraint, called on the response to be “swift, decisive, overwhelming.”

This talk I must square with the images of children being pulled from cratered buildings, with burns and wounds for which there’s no anesthetic because Israel has placed a siege on the population—no water, food, electricity or medical supplies for one of the most crowded cities in the world, pummeled by some of its most sophisticated weaponry.

There may be things to be said about all this in terms of The Climate According to Life. How does the desertification of the land influence the cycles of violence upon it? What would the restoration of the land offer in terms of pathways out of the vengeance-cycle?

But I don’t want to ask these questions, not now. Not in the midst of carnage.

Call for Water

That for which there are no poems.
That which craters words
     before they can cohere.
The inner walls of the soul are dusted
     by the ash falling through.

All I can think to call for is water.
Water for the eyes of the grieving.
Water for the hearts of the vengeance stricken.
Water for the mouths of the rubble broken.

Water for the pyre of innocence
burning in the desert
     kept alive in ceremonies 
of vengeance and power.