broken spoke to me

when there are no words

I’ve spent much of this past week in utter overwhelm. Unable to stop watching the atrocities of the world unfold, unable to fully trust all that I see, and utterly disturbed by so much of the discourse surrounding the story itself. I’ve found myself unexpectedly in tears, my heart aching for the people of Israel and for Palestinians whose only crime was to have been born in Gaza. 

This morning, I awoke to an alert on my phone that Israel had issued a warning to the people of Gaza and a path of escape when, in reality, no one is getting out alive or at least unscathed. If geography is destiny, this feels like the end of the world.

I’m supposed to be writing an essay. I’m supposed to be promoting a new retreat. At the moment, both feel entirely pointless. 

To the questions, how did this happen, what can we do, how can we make it all stop, I have no answers and don’t believe my opinions as someone far removed matter regardless. Yes, I am Jewish, but there have also been moments when my body has felt like an occupied territory. They are both the stitches of my story, but neither have relevance to where I sit today.

So, for now, I will do what I can, which isn’t the same as looking away in ignorance, but it is the wisdom to know the difference between what is and is not ultimately in my control. Today, I will turn off the television and make soup for my sick child; I will reach out to a friend who is hurting, and I share a poem by Louise Gluck because at heart she was the poet of a fallen world.¹

May she rest in peace. May we all find ways to rest in peace.

thanks for reading ~

Ripe Peach

1
There was a time
only certainty gave me
any joy. Imagine —
certainty, a dead thing.

2
And then the world,
the experiment.
The obscene mouth
famished with love —
it is like love:
the abrupt, hard
certainty of the end —

3
In the center of the mind,
the hard pit,
the conclusion. As though
the fruit itself
never existed, only
the end, the point
midway between
anticipation and nostalgia —

4
So much fear.
So much terror of the physical world.
The mind frantic
guarding the body from
the passing, the temporary,
the body straining against it —

5
A peach on the kitchen table.
A replica. It is the earth,
the same
disappearing sweetness
surrounding the stone end,
and like the earth
available —

6
An opportunity
for happiness: earth
we cannot possess
only experience — And now
sensation: the mind
silenced by fruit —

7
They are not
reconciled. The body
here, the mind
separate, not
merely a warden:
it has separate joys.
It is the night sky,
the fiercest stars are its immaculate distinctions–

8
Can it survive? Is there
light that survives the end
in which the mind’s enterprise
continues to live: though
darting about the room,
above the bowl of fruit–

9
Fifty years. the night sky
filled with shooting stars.
Light, music
from far away — I must be
nearly gone. I must be
stone, since the earth
surrounds me —

10
There was
a peach in a wicker basket.
There was a bowl of fruit.
Fifty years. Such a long walk
from the door to the table.

1. Dan Bolden