Poem of Sadness and Horror

It feels to me that hope for a ceasefire in Gaza is shrinking every day. People of conscience are still advocating for it, and I was relieved to read in the Guardian’s email newsletter this morning that “the US withheld about 3,500 bombs owing to concerns that they would fuel killing in Rafah.” I am glad for this incremental change, although it’s a tiny step in a much larger, more confounding horror.  

Recently I shared a poem about the world I’d like to see more of in the Middle East and everywhere. Today I’m sharing the other poem I wrote at the invitation of a friend who was sending them as an anti-war action to our congressperson’s office. It’s a poem of horror, sadness, mourning. It grew out of a prompt in a writing workshop to inhabit the body of a character. One of the characters I’m exploring in a new manuscript is Lot’s wife from the Old Testament. Someone else in the workshop had shared earlier an essay that meditated on salt, which gave me the idea of writing in the voice of Lot’s wife after she was turned into a pillar of salt.

You can see her on the left side of this painting, looking at the burning city. Not only is she unnamed in the story, she's not included in the title of this image or many others in which she's depicted.

De vlucht van Lot en zijn dochters uit Sodom (The flight of Lot and his daughters from Sodom)

When looking for a poem to respond to the war in Gaza, I settled on this one, with its connection to the sadly perennial acts of violence documented in the scriptures and stories of our Abrahamic religions. Posting it here feels about as useful as shouting into a thunderstorm. But, as Sharon Olds wrote about a different type of violence, “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”  

 

When I Became Salt 

 

The god made  

in my husband’s image 

wanted to destroy the city 

in peace. He could feel me 

watching, couldn’t stand it, 

calcified my mother-grief. 

 

My caring was welcome  

in our city with its wells and 

trees, but I was pillared  

to salt for turning to witness  

the price of my family’s  

freedom. 

 

Turn me to salt if I forget. 

 

I am sister to Daphne 

the laurel tree, disobedient, 

punished by desire. Like salt we are 

essential yet dangerous, treasured  

and feared, savored 

but scorned. 

 

Some said, “It was better 

to be enslaved in Egypt ...”  

I say: It was better to sin in the city  

than to immolate daughters,  

sons, grandchildren  

in the desert. 

 

Turn me to salt if I forget. 

 

 

Poem for Peace in the Middle East

It’s a beautiful sunny morning here in Easthampton. The birds are singing and the daffodils are blooming. Soon I will make toast and eggs for breakfast. Earlier when my dog woke me up to take her out, the sky was just turning from black to a bright greenish blue in the east and one robin was trilling a mellifluous aria. 

My heart is heavy with ache and sadness at the latest round of military funding my government is sending to the Israeli government as they enact their unconscionable and horrific campaign against Palestinian humans in Gaza. No one with a heart and an open mind can actually, literally believe this war is only against the unconscionable and horrific acts of Hamas. The starving and orphaned children, the targeted aid workers, the families displaced with nowhere to go… it’s sickening. The holocaust by the Nazi government in Europe against Jewish people and other “undesirables” less than 100 years ago was also sickening, unconscionable, horrific. 

I heard a Jewish acquaintance reiterate recently that Israel is the place they knew they could go if everything else fell apart. And yet I also heard a Jewish friend affirm recently that her experience when she visited Israel was that Palestinians are forced to live in a system of apartheid even when there’s not an active war going on. 

This grim cycle of violence churns throughout history and casts a long shadow on the future. 

I feel like I’ve done all I can do. I called my representative. I sent emails and signed petitions for a ceasefire. I spoke twice at my city council meeting in support of the ceasefire resolution that recently passed and was sent to our Massachusetts congresspeople and to the U.S. president. At the invitation of a poet friend, I wrote a poem about the world I would like to see, instead of this one where my tax dollars fund bombs that destroy innocent people’s lives, families, and culture. 

The thought of writing something to speak to this moment of genocide in Palestine was overwhelming to me, so for guidance I thought about a positive memory of cross-cultural connection and, in terms of form, I took as a model another poem I wrote about encountering folks with whom I could barely communicate but who were guided by a sense of basic goodwill. 

Dove of Peace by Pablo Picasso

This is the poem I wrote about the type of world I’d like to see more of. 

Daybreak at the Red Sea

On the bus from Cairo 

to Dahab, we crossed

the Sinai peninsula, stopped

in the black night

at a roadside shack.

Bare bulbs illumined tables of food. 

Out back

was the real desert

& a sky rich with stars.

Mom said, If you don’t know 

the word, just smile and point.

In the cafeteria

my first semester at college

we were

Muslim, Jewish, Christian,

Hindu, lesbian, bisexual

all eating tater tots

& sharing. Unlike

elsewhere, our singularities

didn’t divide us.

Dad said, Every soldier is someone’s 

cousin. I will not fight them.

At the guesthouse

a deck of cards was enough

to make friends.

Reading (and Not Reading) about Grief

I’ve heard of several deaths recently, more than usual (is there a usual amount of death?) among friends or relatives of my friends and relatives. People far enough from me that I don’t know much more than their names or identifiers (like her uncle or her son), but close enough for me to feel sympathetic waves of sadness from their sudden absence and the wrongness in their passing. Because most if not all of these deaths have not been peaceful, expected or the culmination of a well-lived life.   

When my dear mother died, at age 69 and after nearly 10 years of dancing back and forth with cancer, I was gut-shakingly sad. One of the best gifts I received at that time was hearing from someone who described grieving the loss of her own mother as “primal.” It was a feeling I could fall into yet somehow not drown in. Profoundly painful, but not horrifying. I even had moments of wonder, experiencing her death as the natural and mysterious flip side of her birth.  

But these deaths from violence or trauma, accident or mistake? There's less sense to be made, and wonder is elusive.  

*

After my mother died, I wanted to find instructions for grieving, maybe a guidebook to the foreign land of motherlessness. My therapist said: No. Don’t read anything for the first few months. Just let yourself feel whatever you feel. That was not the guidance I wanted, but it was good, helpful advice. I don’t remember much from those first few months, but there was certainly a good amount of crying or staring absently into the middle distance. When my wife kindly took me on a day trip to our favorite beach in Maine, the openness of the sky and the rhythmic power of the waves were wordless, nourishing recipients of my pain.  

I come from beach people on my mother’s side. She grew up on Long Island, with daily summertime trips to float in the swell at Jones Beach after her father came home from work. When he died unexpectedly in his 50s, she took her mother for a walk on the empty winter beach. I still have a fragment of a seashell she collected that day. That’s what we do, how we process things that are big and overwhelming, especially when there’s nothing to be done.  

Whether it’s the ocean, a mountain, or simply the sky we all share, I hope that those who are grieving can feel they have something, somewhere, larger than themselves to witness and receive their wordless pain.  

At the beach in Connecticut on the fifth anniversary of my mom's passing 

*

When I did eventually read some books about grief, two were particularly helpful. Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing by grief counselor Louis E. LaGrand is warm, kind, simple, practical.  

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by psychologist Francis Weller is more spiritual, communal, and mystical. I’ve been re-reading parts of it again lately, as it speaks to the common human experience of a continual flow between love and loss, desire and desolation, in all areas of life.  

And I think this recent Discover article, The Stages of Grief Are Unique to Everyone, but They Can Help us Cope, is a good place to start for a shorter introduction to some of these concepts. 

Here’s a poem I wrote about one of my journeys. 

Stages

A purple tulip bud 
clenched and dark 
slowly unfurls   
a central white star. 
Grief reveals 
in its own time 
if a fist can become   
an open palm.  

 

Wandering Through the Dark

I’m excited that the spring equinox is getting closer, although the time change has been tough for me to adjust to this week. Green leaves of daffodils, crocuses, and tulips are showing themselves in my garden, hinting at bright colors to come. It’s easy for me to write about flowers and beauty, but before that begins again, I want to take time to acknowledge the dark we’ve come through here in the Northern Hemisphere.  

This year's solstice wheel

Every year the seasons do their circle dance, and some parts are more welcome than others. I have learned, though, that even dark winter days have their own beauty and gifts. This is mainly thanks to a meditative practice led by Carolyn Cushing called Descent and Return of the Light, where we use Tarot cards and candles to explore and learn from the long nights surrounding the winter solstice. I did this e-retreat for the third time this year, and one of the helpful phrases that came to me was that I can “keep the darkness in my heart.” The December holidays can feel like mandated, simplistic happiness that grates on me if I’m not able to also hold space for sadness and complexity.  

Card image of The Moon from The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans

For a meditation prompt about who or what can be a guide through the dark, I pulled the moon card, which signifies directionless! I was frustrated by the idea at first, but as I thought about it, I came to a more mystical sense of trusting that I can wander without being “lost.” (Like in the famous Tolkien quote.) Soon after that, I was walking by the ocean on a dark night with no moon, noticing rich layers of darkness with the deep water, the new moon, and the midnight winter cold. Here’s a poem I wrote from that experience.