Israeli tanks carve a Star of David into a field in Gaza during Israel’s ongoing ground invasion of Gaza. This photo was shared by Daniel Hagari on the @IDFSpokesperson X/Twitter account on November 17, 2023.


if our survival is to be Jewish
October 2023

i

my tears are crying 
I am drowning

no longer wandering
in the wilderness 
we have become
the pharaoh

ii

centuries of
sacred celebration
and suffering
sunk into strident subjugation

the mirror is cracking

iii

my despair is desperate
I am trembling

our prayers 
so full of longing
mock us

we chant 
in the shade
of a homeland
shuttering for half a century 
the lives of humans 
we push out of sight behind
(prison) Walls

iv

my anger is angry
I am shaking

our silence grows deadly
with the deal we’ve made 
to defend our hearts
from knowing
they love their children
their laughter their lives 
as much as we do

v

my rage is raging
I am bent
over

Jewish godmother to 
an exuberant Palestinian boy, 
now a man

my love for him
a kind of genesis,
his love for me a kind of grace

he would hate us
otherwise

not any kind of anti-Semitism

consequences 
for making of him a demon,
and discarding him daily in the dust
of so many, too many checkpoints

vi

my trauma is traumatized
I am broken

we condemn them 
for making corpses of
our children
as we make corpses 
of theirs

the math of it
is bleeding us

dry

vii

my people, my Jewish people,
I don’t know how to reach you

our fear is afraid
and forgets
we are the ones 
settling, seizing, sequestering

we pile fear upon fear like 
stacks of rubble from
houses demolished
dreams destroyed
for decades

viii

my grief is grieving
I am wailing

we did not outlive
the horrors of holocaust
to hoard survival
like this

to hollow ourselves out

ix

or did we

x

my people, my Jewish people,

tell me it is not too late
to choose another way