A Prayer for the People

Words feel like they mostly just add to the weight. But poetry can lighten and enlighten. A poem for you, for us, from my dear friend, Moriel.

My beloved college friend, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, has seen me through some hard times. Walked with me through the California desert on my walk across America. Guided me in my writing. Counseled me through breakups. We’ve drifted, and found each other again. We find each other, shoulder our way through the crowd of our commitments, swim through the river of busyness, make bird calls to each other in the dark forest of modernity till we find the little clearing that is our own, is our friendship. We find each other when we both need to remember who we are and why we’re here.

He’s a brilliant writer and poet, professor at Swarthmore, author of the novel Sadness is a White Bird, a moving love story about three teenagers in the Middle East, two Palestinian twins and an Israeli young man drafted into the military. He also recently published another astonishing novel, Before All the World, a courageous tale that follows a pogrom survivor’s journey to America and the love story of two queer men in 1920s Philadelphia, one Black and one Jewish.

I’ve been wanting to write something, share something here in the Courtyard, about the violence, the suffering, the unspeakable heartbreak right now in Israel-Palestine. And I just haven’t had anything to say. I sat up at night for an hour this week, just scribbling words, all of them incoherent, always ending in a blankness. I couldn’t write anything truer than the blank page.

I checked in on Moriel, thinking “How’s my Mori?”, feeling out for my brother, and he texted me back this poem. I knew these were the words I wanted to share: as a prayer for all of them, all of us, and as a supplication that the mystery of peace might somehow find her way into the unexpecting hearts of the many millions of human beings at the epicenter of the conflict, and into our own hearts, too, right here, right now. I am so grateful to feature his poem in the Courtyard.

Thank you, Moriel, for what you’ve lived that made you a proper channel for these words to come through. May we all find who we need to grieve now, to exalt this agonizing mystery of our oneness, to remember who we are, in this painful time of profound forgetting.

Amen.

Why I Cannot Speak in Full Sentences

I am the child

whose parents

were shot dead

in front of her

and the young

man who shot

them, who picks

his nose in the

evenings, who

still dreams at

night that he

is a Pokémon

catcher—I am

him too. I am

the girl who is

afraid to walk

near windows

so she just pees

in her bed as

the warplanes

fly above her

like imaginary

monsters, there

to burn up her

home, and the

young man in

that cockpit,

pimples near

his nose and

a weird ability

to remember

the lyrics to

many foreign

pop songs—

I am him too.

I press down

on the button,

on the trigger,

as I was told

to and I kill

my children,

my siblings,

I kill my old

grandparents,

knowing eyes,

teeth loose in

their mouths

as they murmur

about god—

I am the news

pundit, social

media jouster,

all the leaders

of this blood-

effort, beneath

my cheering or

my edicts I am

mumbling, help

me, I try to say

but I cannot

speak because

my mouth is

packed full

with the bitter

and familiar

taste of my

own flesh.