Vox Populi
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Kathryn Levy: The Gaza Poems
Gaza
To understand poetry we need four white
walls and a silence where the poet’s voice
can weep and sing.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
And when
the walls are collapsing?
even as you rush
to prop up each surface
and a man in a mask keeps
ripping the notebooks where
the past was retrieved—and
reburied, created—. When
the word created sticks
like a fist in your throat
and you suddenly can’t breathe
or see the reason for breathing
and the bombs won’t stop
exploding the dream of one
moment of quiet when you
might finally see, when
finally—you—even the last
lines on this page are not
true anymore and you clutch
onto a kite from
a dead man’s poem as
someone keeps chanting, Now
that can be him, and
you try not to scream, No—
it can’t—
~~~
Because the Others
are marching to the village
with knives in their fists
and rifles and sayings:
Death to the Arabs—death
to the children, who keep
crouching in the cupboards.
Death chanted
in Hebrew or German
or Russian or the language
of what does it matter? Because
the children can’t hear,
and if they could, the cries
wouldn’t make sense.
Because sense died
in a concrete chamber, with only
gas pouring in, as
someone still thought—but there
must be salvation. Is
that what she thought? Because
I wasn’t there and I
always am guessing, as I merely
watch from the sidewalk,
because I am afraid, as
others are afraid, of standing
like a stone in the road
and finally
stopping the marching
or pleading—Why?
For which
I know the old answer—because
and because of
the others—
~~
Rubble
I’m still living today, I
repeat to the TV as another baby
is torn from the rubble. But I’m
protesting that fact, I shout to the glass
facades of the towers,
holding up placards, chanting
my slogans. I’m just
a ghost on a mission,
I whisper to the others, who
read the long list of
the babies in the rubble,
mispronouncing their names, never
touching their bodies. But I
have some real purpose—
I sit with this notebook
in a tower built on
decades of rubble
to confide the truth to
a roomful of ghosts
who can’t be bodies, who
never were babies, with
the names I don’t have
the time to retrieve—I keep
making appointments in
the streets of the living, the
sleepwalking crowds
marching to dinner, or to
the bedside of a friend
who stares at the TV—What
is all that noise? The tired nurse
tries to explain—They call it
and call it still
living.
~~
Copyright 2024 Kathryn Levy.
Kathryn Levy is a poet and activist who lives in Sag Harbor, New York. Her publications include Reports (New Rivers, 2013).
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The words, images, motion of the lines captures/creates/evokes this terrible moment and the grief that we are all implicated — especially Americans.
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Thank you. I agree.
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Ah, Kathryn, you understand as few do.
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Thank you, my friend.
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These poems are the epitome of poignant. Deeply heartfelt. But for me, this time around, the attached picture of the young Palestinian child alone in the rubble holds equal power. Stripping away the usual triteness of that old, often over-used saying – ‘a picture worth a thousand words.’
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I know exactly what you mean, Jackie. Thank you.
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I know what you mean too.
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Wonderful poems, Kathryn Levy. A voice for so many of us.
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Thank you, my friend. The journey to these poems was very difficult, so I appreciate it.
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Yes, just heartbreaking. I was such a child. Once. And it never stops. For no-one. It’s always just ‘the other’.
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Oh, Rosemary, I’m so sorry you went through this. My father-in-law, Klaus Spork, was 9 when he had to hide under a staircase as the British bombed his town of Siegen in central Germany in 1943. Half the house was destroyed and caught fire, but he survived. What a terrible thing war is.
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It is indeed. And my heart breaks for all the children who experience this terrible thing called war and hunger. The thought makes we weep.
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Yes, that “othering” has appalled me for decades.
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Es hermoso……gracias….Santos
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Gracias, Ramon Santos Insua.
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