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Noelle Canin: War Watching
War Watching
For Erella
I know what blood looks like, she said.
I know what a home looks like
after a bomb.
I know what bodies look like.
How parents rock children
against their chests, as if their own hearts
could regenerate the small
death-locked organs.
I don’t need television or the networks
to bring violence home to me.
Our countries provide a package deal.
A life subscription to war.
~~~
War
In the time it takes to cross a room
a building implodes, the void gaping
at men women and children
after the baited embrace of a bomb.
You are dead, or perhaps alive,
the misshapen dead bleeding
into your life
now strewn across the city.
The bomb is released into
living homes in the time it takes
to cross the street, turn,
and stumble into the crater
of your heart.
Between the slabs of concrete,
You recognize the hem of her dress.
—–
~~~
Noelle Canin was born and raised in South Africa during the Apartheid era. She immigrated to Israel in 1968 and lived on Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev Desert for 18 years. During this time she had two children, studied literature and linguistics at Ben Gurion University and began to translate Hebrew literature into English. Today Noelle Canin lives in Haifa. In addition to working as a translator, she is also a Bodymind therapist in the spirit of Hakomi Psychotherapy. She has published poetry in various journals in Israel, the USA, Scotland, Australia and England.
Copyright 2025 Noelle Canin. War Watching was published in First of the Month. A previous version of War was published in Let the Rain Listen for Me.
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The grievous clarity in these two poems💔
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Grievous clarity is a great description of the imagery of these poems.
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Oh, Beautiful Noelle, how powerfully you share this devastation and open our hearts. Thank you.
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I was a child in WWII.
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Then you surely know what children endure in a war, how much terror they go through, their parents unable to protect them. Nobody else there to do so.
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That’s what I meant to say.
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Thanks for Noelle Canin’s poems that connect us to compassion, while wars and terrorism devastate the innocent through their realms evil and of death.
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I agree, the poems are terrifying, but also compassionate.
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All I can say after reading these devastating poems is Thank you, Noelle Canin.
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Courageous and poignant poems, with so much between the lines — I applaud them.Thank you, Michael for publishing them, and I agree with Barbara: that last line of “War”!
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That last line
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