The Novel

 

I joined a ‘Free Palestine’ protest in 2009. Today that moment seems almost quaint.

Netanyahu’s Zionists and Hamas extremists, are mirrors, twins, locked into an escalation of extremes. A war not aimed at negotiated peace, but for suffering. Israel’s superior machine, supported by America, will succeed with its eradication of Gazans, if not their genocide. What happened in the Warsaw Ghetto is happening to Gaza.

Still, there are moments of light. Movements initiated by Israelis and Palestinians, linking arms, dedicating themselves to building peace. There are people on both sides willing to live in peace.

But the trauma of this war, visited on common people, will, for most, be impossible to overcome.

The lessons of the Holocaust have been betrayed. The short distance between victim and victimizer has been crossed. Will it surprise us, when arises a more terrible Hamas?

Those lessons, however, can be lost on any of us. We are all susceptible to the darker lusts of superiority, hatred and vengeance. All capable of hurling our poison at those we deem as evil, inhuman.

Nothing but some kind of spiritual awakening can open us, and keep us seeing one another as embodiments of the sacred, and so bring a collective renunciation of aggression.

The Novel

When a bomb comes for a book, the whole library
is gone.
But meanings survive.

Sometimes they scatter.
Then, needing individual attention
they knock on the doors of listening poets.

And sometimes they organize,
quite naturally, into a family,
and visit a young woman living above a health food store,
writing her first novel.

But some meanings, like old men with privilege,
can be lazy,
and some can be tempted, greased
to recite the same old myths.

The same tired stories of redemptive payback,
same contagion of sanctified hate,
same deadly eye-for-eye, and up-the-ante:
and the hill-dwelling shepherd, becomes a savage giant.

But the cooling breeze, the holy flow,
the dawning Spirit–whispering to the human heart–
cuts its own current, curates the new dance.

It was Pilate that roared, “Don’t you know who I am?
I have the power to lynch you!”
“And I Am the one,” said the incommensurate Son,
“who has the power to love you, the power to let you.”

And just there, her novel took shape.