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.
Oh! the poem, oh the blank page, oh the grief and oh the rage.
Thank you for this language for this moment of horror. I feel less alone having read it.
A truthful depiction of life. Lovely and sad.