Palestinian Poet Refaat Alareer Killed by Israeli Forces in Gaza

This article from the Los Angeles Review of Books gives us a personal and meaningful look at who he was, what he contributed to poetry and literature, as well as to Palestinian culture. Just before he died, he wrote a poem which has caught the world’s imagination. But first, I want to share a different poem, one that captures the plight of all Palestinians, those in Gaza, where he lived and worked at a wonderful university now reduced by Israel to a pile of rubble.

I Am You

Two steps: one, two.

‏Look in the mirror:

‏The horror, the horror!

‏The butt of your M-16 on my cheekbone

‏The yellow patch it left

‏The bullet-shaped scar expanding

‏Like a swastika,

‏Snaking across my face,

‏The heartache flowing

‏Out of my eyes dripping

‏Out of my nostrils piercing

‏My ears flooding

‏The place.

‏Like it did to you

‏70 years ago

‏Or so.

‏I am just you.

‏I am your past haunting

‏Your present and your future.

‏I strive like you did.

‏I fight like you did.

‏I resist like you resisted

‏And for a moment,

‏I’d take your tenacity

‏As a model,

‏Were you not holding

‏The barrel of the gun

‏Between my bleeding

‏Eyes.

One. Two.

‏The very same gun

‏The very same bullet

‏That had killed your Mom

‏

And killed your Dad

‏Is being used,

‏Against me,

‏By you.

‏Mark this bullet and mark in your gun.

‏If you sniff it, it has your and my blood.

‏It has my present and your past.

‏It has my present.

‏It has your future.

‏That’s why we are twins,

‏Same life track

‏Same weapon

‏Same suffering

‏Same facial expressions drawn

‏On the face of the killer,

‏Same everything

‏Except that in your case

‏The victim has evolved, backward,

‏Into a victimizer.

‏I tell you.

‏I am you.

‏Except that I am not the you of now.

‏I do not hate you.

‏I want to help you stop hating

‏And killing me.

‏I tell you:

‏The noise of your machine gun

‏Renders you deaf

‏The smell of the powder

‏Beats that of my blood.

‏The sparks disfigure

‏My facial expressions.

‏Would you stop shooting?

‏For a moment?

‏Would you?

‏All you have to do

‏Is close your eyes

‏(Seeing these days

‏Blinds our hearts.)

‏Close your eyes, tightly

‏So that you can see

‏In your mind’s eye.

‏Then look into the mirror.

‏One. Two.

‏I am you.

‏I am your past.

‏And killing me,

‏You kill you.

And here’s the one he wrote just before he died, as if he intuitively felt his death was imminent. In fact, all the people of Gaza, every man, woman, and child, feels the imminence of encompassing death everywhere they look. How do they keep their humanity, their resilience? And how does Israel repress so strenuously their own conscience? These are questions we all must ask. It is a time that separates those with human hearts still functioning with an actual conscience, and those utterly devoid of it whose hearts are sealed.

If I must die

By Refaat Alareer

November 1, 2023

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

Kimiko Hahn Captures This Moment

It’s been ages since I last posted here, mostly due to personal issues and life changes. But as I am traumatized by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the support for this in “developed countries”, among other things, I found this poem by the wonderful poet Kimiko Hahn captures the moment’s tribulation. I will insert it as a photo to get the formatting right.

Kimiko Hahn is an award-winning major poet: winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the winner of the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the 2007 Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, as well as the American Book Award for her book The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), and more.

Poetry Magazine says “Her work is noted for its intertextuality and wide-ranging subject matter,” and she “asserted that her early exposure to activism and community organizing as well as her racial identity profoundly influenced her approach to poetry.” Thus, in a lecture she mentioned:

“How could my parents have known that in dance class I’d meet Aichi Kochiyama and come to know her radical family (her mother Yuri Kochiyama, well known for her radical politics, held the dying Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom).”

Maybe that’s why her poem is is so prescient and meaningful – and to have been published now, it’s likely the events unfolding in the Middle East hadn’t yet begun (unless publishing processes have picked up speed). Just to help us all see the universality of the human condition and its many struggles for justice, against the enemies of truth.

My Review of David Mason’s Pacific Light on Los Angeles Review of Books

My review of David Mason’s latest poetry collection Pacific Light is up on the Los Angeles Review of Books website. It’s a book full of beauty and enlightenment you don’t want to miss. Please read the review to get an idea about it and excerpts from his unforgettable poetry. Much thanks to LARB’s fantastic Editor-in-Chief editor Boris Dralyuk, himself a fine poet as well.

Lucille Lang Day: Rebel, Poet, Scientist

Lucille Lang Day has been on my radar for quite some time, but today I actually discovered her. Not just her poetry, her 11 books of poetry (as I counted from her website), her many awards and her anthologies, books of prose and memoirs, like Married at Fourteen, not even the poem I had just read this morning which led me to all this from a link in my inbox, not even her scholarly science papers, her degrees, but more than all this it was the discovery of her, who inspired me to come back and post on this website again, after the death of my husband, and of others too, including my oldest brother, and then the losses not by death but estrangement that in some ways hurt the most. Lucy Day’s life story itself is so vibrant, and so unusual, something she embraces to the benefit of all of us. As if her story is telling me now it’s high time to embrace my own oddities, those histories it seems no one could possibly accept. And not just accept, but flaunt them, no holds barred. It is her delightful courage really that inspires.

So this poem kind of exemplifies what I love in her work, the impetuous storytelling, the sense that life is just bursting from the seams, and that we can’t just hold it all in, that it was meant, and so we can make it destined, to be shared.

Return to Acushnet
To my mother, Evelyn Lang

I finally see your life—
a page ripped from a book, 
its meaning, emotions, intent 
fragmentary and obscured.
I’ve found the town where you were born,
whose name you never told me,
and met the family you were torn from,
not as a baby
but as a child old enough to know
your mother was dead,
your father was letting you go.

I ran an ad to find descendants 
of your father’s sisters. 
One lived in a log cabin in Acushnet,
amid red maples, weeds, abandoned cars. 
Her crazy brother lived alone next door 
in the shingled farmhouse that belonged 
to your grandparents when they were young
and raising children, chickens, pigs, and cows.

The fireflies in Massachusetts winked and glowed
in the elms in early summer,
constellations of memories
appearing and disappearing amid the leaves,
your life itself like a leaf
cleaved too soon from the tree.

Out back, a tractor sat rusting in tall grass—
the carcass of an animal,
fossilized, extinct. The barn 
had fallen down the year before. The porch 
that used to wrap around the house
was gone. A notice in the window said 
“Condemned.” The once grand stairs inside
were carpeted with dust. Paint peeled 
from the walls; boxes, bags, and garbage 
filled the rooms. I went upstairs: 
I had to see it all. Pine floorboards 
were loose, cobwebs everywhere.

I closed my eyes and saw bright quilts 
where long ago your father’s sisters slept. 
When I came back down, 
Cousin Ken stared straight ahead
in the kitchen, trembling from his drugs.

Mother, eight years dead, 
your father, aunts and uncle, 
all long gone, are listed on the Internet. 
Imagine it! Ernestine, born first, 
watched the little ones: Valetta, 
Harriet, and Mabel, who quilted, sang, 
and put on plays; Rowland and your father,
Ebenezer, who liked to trick the girls. 
The night I visited the house 
where they were born, Grandpa Eb 
appeared in a dream, lithe 
and handsome, with his big mustache.

“Go back to California,” he said. 
“I’ll come visit you.” I think he wanted
to stand beside me, watching
a Western gull, its pink feet
skimming the crests of the Pacific,
hear Hutton’s vireo call
from the top of a California oak, wrap
his taut arms tight around us both
like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to the mast,
but I knew in the end he’d let go.

Remembering Extraordinary Poet Susan de Sola

It is hard for me to imagine that Susan de Sola (Rodstein) is no longer with us. She was always so vital, the very embodiment of creative energy coupled with a vibrant sense of humor. Although we only met virtually, I consider her a dear friend, who reached out to me because we both have five children, and whose kindness transcended borders and preconceptions. Both poet and critic, her recent book Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press, 2019) has met rave reviews, a book so expressive of her unique poetic voice. A winner of the Frost Farm Poetry Prize for her moving poem ”Buddy,” she also wrote a poem in the voice of a rock, indicative of her imaginative style. We had all thought this was the first of many books. A delight as both a poet and a generous, loving human being, I will always remember her, and wish her family well. From her book, these lovely poems:

Eve Sleeps

Each night we form a double C.
Hand rests on hip or curves to breast,
chest to back, his strong legs pressed
to make a chair of flesh for me.
Adjudications of the breath,
Adam’s apple near my head,
we’re stacked for storage in this bed
as sleep suspends us near a death.
Twins in the dark, we knit a seam
from toe to crown, a tensile wire.
Our eyes roll blind, they roll desire.
Locked in body, branched to dream,
we fall into this darker space.
Each cannot see the other’s face.

The Tulips

We bought them at a farmer’s field, so plump
and red—great goblets, plush concavities
which made of content an irrelevancy.
For days we took delight in their post-mortem
magic. What had this red exuberance
to do with death? They anchored down the table,
held center stage, just like an aria,
a swelling note we held against the odds.

But now they start to fall apart, and see,
they deconstruct so cleanly! Diving petals
reveal a pattern on the inner corner,
a three-point wedge of aubergine-black, capped
by arching yellow bands; a stylized print
of itself in little, vector to the ribbed red
flank, which had barely aged. The tiny tulip-
print anticipates its slide to symbol.
The sleekly flattened violet pistils spill
out scarcely any powder. Slim green stalks
with small white crowns stand bare. Abstract.
A Dutch-bobbed slouching flapper of a flower,
so modernist and sleek, a silhouette.
A flower a cartoonist might invent.

I sweep the petals up in great big bunches,
the dustbin blazing; it had never looked better.
But it’s become almost a game. The petals
fall at random—yet they seem to fall
in answer to our conversation, plunging
at key words, thumping downward during our
significant pauses, heard in silences.
Blowsy, lipsticked interlocutors;
drunken smacks, and dried-out goodbye kisses.

My Poem “The Birth of Venus” Published on New Site Lit.Hub at The News Station

credit: The News Station

Please check it out! This is a poem long in the making but joyful in the finish. And I love the picture that goes with it. I highly recommend the whole site.

My Poem Third Place Winner in Beulah Rose Contest!

Smartish Pace

Wild Pink Rose, maybe the Legendary Beulah Rose?

To my utter surprise and delight, my poem “The Sum of Time” has won Third Place in the 17th annual Beulah Rose Poetry Contest! I’m so honored that it has been published in the prestigious journal Smartish Pace, to which I recommend subscribing. And I am especially grateful to the contest judge Traci O’Dea, one of my favorite poets with her playful and surprising use of words and forms, a true original.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths: A Striking Personal Language

Rachel Eliza Griffith’s poetry has this satisfyingly startling quality at every turn, both highly communicative yet nothing is ever predictable. Her use of language hits on a very personal level and yet we can all feel it, nothing is opaque, her words convey their meaning in devastating clarity. Her most recent book, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton, 2020), is a hybrid of her own photography with her poetry. An award-winning author of several books, this recent book deals with the death of her mother in 2013.

In an interview with Four-Way Books, her relationship with photography and how that helped her express and come to terms with her grief, and how she ultimately decided this book had to combine both photography and poetry, reminded me of my own turn towards photography in dealing with my own grief. As she put it in the interview, prior to her mother’s death, she had been working with photography and came back to it as a necessity.

“I had to go back and consider what I was ‘making’ when I was unmade by her death. Then I also remembered the deliberate focus I gave photography immediately after her death. I clung to the machine, my camera, like a life raft.”

She also describes her experiences as a black woman artist in stark eloquence: “There isn’t enough canvas, enough pigment, enough bones in this country for black artists to address the violence and harm done to our bodies, our communities, by the imaginations or institutions that can’t bear for us to live. It isn’t our job or our art’s job to do that work either. Why is America afraid that we dare to imagine ourselves as anything but dead?”

So without further ado, a selection of her poetry.

ELEGY, SURROUNDED BY SEVEN TREES

for Michelle Antoinette Pray-Griffiths

Ordinary days deliver joy easily
again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you
how her eyes laughed or describe
the rage of her suffering, I must
admit that lately my memories
are sometimes like a color
warping in my blue mind.
Metal abandoned in rain.

My mother will not move.

Which is to say that
sometimes the true color of
her casket jumps from my head
like something burnt down
in the genesis of a struck flame.
Which is to say that I miss
the mind I had when I had
my mother. I own what is yet.
Which means I am already
holding my own absence
in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper
where she once wrote a word
with a pencil & crossed it out.

From tree to tree, around her grave
I have walked, & turned back
if only to remind myself
that there are some kinds of
peace, which will not be
moved. How awful to have such
wonder. The final way wonder itself
opened beneath my mother’s face
at the last moment. As if she was
a small girl kneeling in a puddle
& looking at her face for the first time,
her fingers gripping the loud,
wet rim of the universe.

Three Poems in Society of Classical Poetry

Three of my poems were published on the Society of Classical Poets site here. “The Inca Kings,” “The Swimming Lesson,” and “Elegy for Mary” (my sister), were all published last month, but unfortunately I was in a difficult state of mind, thus am late to publish this. Do check them out!

Major Jackson: Bard of Many Worlds

Major Jackson is a major poet, a major player with language, a voice which conjures many worlds, and through all of these, he brings vision, perspective, validation to the rest of us. One see in his work that he is well-traveled and has experienced many different perspectives, which gives his poetry resonance with a wide audience. Awarded many prizes, even his first book, Leaving Saturn (2002), won a prize, the Cave Canem First Book Prize. A more comprehensive list of his many achievements is here. The poem below reminds us of the ways people of color are so often erased, to which this poem is a brilliant retort and of course so much more. To-wit:

On Disappearing 

I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is
full of my thinking. An archbishop
prays for my soul, even though
we only met once, and even then, he was
busy waving at a congregation.
The ticking clocks in Vermont sway

back and forth as though sweeping
up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors,
and what comes up are the great paragraphs
of dust, which also carry motes
of my existence. I have not disappeared.
My wife quivers inside a kiss.
My pulse was given to her many times,

in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip
in olive oil is communion with our ancestors,
who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs
I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have
given me freedom which is a crater
I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves
of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs,

a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic,
makes me appear to those who think I’ve
disappeared. It’s too bad war makes people
disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons
turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade
into the mountains on a forest trail,
I still have not disappeared, even though its green facade
turns my arms and legs into branches of oak.
It is then I belong to a southerly wind,
which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back
and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just
lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared.

In my children, I see my bulging face
pressing further into the mysteries.

In a library in Tucson, on a plane above
Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns
a controlled fire, I am held by a professor,
a General, and a photographer.
One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs
the scented pages of my books, scouring
for the bitter smell of control.
I hold him in my mind like a chalice.
I have not disappeared. I swish the amber
hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling
rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers.

When we talk about limits, we disappear.
In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel.

I am a shrug of a life in sacred language.
Right now: termites toil over a grave.
My mind is a ravine of yesterdays.
At a glance from across the room, I wear
September on my face,
which is eternal, and does not disappear
even if you close your eyes once and for all
simultaneously like two coffins.