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.