NaPoMo April 6 – “Love Psalm”

Love Psalm in the form of quassams, flung over our prison walls, slingshots of sugar and fertilizer, rockets whistling our tune, carrying the words of our song:           We will come back, we will come back           We have not forgotten you, Mother, Land           to whom we know we belong And when they touch you, having burrowed [...]

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Poetry Wednesday: “Jerusalem” by Naomi Shihab Nye

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another attempt at making a list poem come to life

I’ve been working on various incarnations of this list poem for three years. The idea was good, but it’s been flat and flat and too long and even more too long. Then today, catching up on the activities of the amazing Israeli group Zochrot/Remembering I found a question that made me try again to breathe [...]

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In which I let Rabassa and Barnstone duke it out about memory, error, and the ethics of translation

In his book If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Gregory Rabassa asserts lots of interesting and valuable stuff, then this clinker on pp. 61-62: The completion of work is best done in translation, where the translator can work at things denied the author in his own language, even the way Saint Jerome mistakenly [...]

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Tisha B’Av – Reconsidering Lamentations 5

1Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us. Consider and behold our disgrace. 2Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, Our houses to aliens.        Lamentations 5 פרק ה א זְכֹ֤ר יְהֹוָה֙ מֶֽה־הָ֣יָה לָ֔נוּ הַבִּ֖יטָ [הַבִּ֖יטָה] וּרְאֵ֥ה אֶת־חֶרְפָּתֵֽנוּ: ב נַֽחֲלָתֵ֨נוּ֙ נֶֽהֶפְכָ֣ה לְזָרִ֔ים בָּתֵּ֖ינוּ לְנָכְרִֽים: 1Pay heed, O Lord, to what we bring upon us consider and [...]

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Tisha B’Av in Palestine

Tisha B’Av in Palestine Elliott batTzedek Homes destroyed. Orchards flattened. Buses and markets and buildings          and children bombed. Water tanks overturned, and water, the breath of life to the desert, spilled into the cracks of the dry and desperate Av earth. May I build a house on my land?          No May I travel from here [...]

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A Poem on the Middle East “Peace Process”

A Poem on the Middle East “Peace Process” Etheridge Knight ~1972 Israel à la Begin, begins, “We              /  love  /peace-and-uh Yakady-yakady-yak-yak-yak. That’s why we  /   drove  /              the Palestinians off   /  their   /  land— With the help of america and england’s evil hand. And-ah-yakady-yakady-yak-yak-yak.” In the Gaza strip an Arab boy sleeps, [...]

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On the Omer and counting

A piece I wrote several years ago, “For the Sake of the Innocent Fifty”, has been brought back to my mind this week because so many members of my Jewish tribe continue to believe and say such racist, horrible things about Palestinians as a people. Arguing the facts of 61 years of dispossession is never [...]

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This, friends, is the central point

from a statement by Richard Silverstein and Jeremiah Haber: We affirm the rights of both Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination and self-defense, as we affirm the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This, friends, is indeed the central point. It is not a question of [...]

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Wednesday night

Too much work to do still, getting ready for tomorrow’s workshop, and kinda too overwhelmed, to begin to review everything that went past today. Maybe later, if I still have the ability to string prose together. Tomorrow morning I have a workshop (which is four students and one faculty discussing one poem by each student) [...]

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