by Richard Jeffrey Newman
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| Crowds of displaced Palestinians at a UNRWA-affiliated school in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on December 19th, 2023. Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP at Jewish Currents. |
“You don’t need overt bloodshed to cause significant violence that ends people’s lives. Many people will die unnecessary deaths due to deprivation.” —Yara Asi quoted by Maya Rosen in “The Epidemiological War on Gaza,” Jewish Currents, January 5, 2024
This morning on my daily walk
I met a long-haired shepherd
with ambiguous eyes.
I slowed my pace,
watched the dog’s walker
rein the animal’s curiosity in,
winding tightly around her hand
the tether we tell ourselves
protects people like me,
who believe all others
will of course welcome the friendship
we assume they assume we intend,
and in that moment, the rage
I thought I’d put behind me
at the words of the poet
whose book I was asked to review
sent its own tether out,
and I heard myself again
reading his lines aloud
as I sat some months ago
alone among my books,
confirming I’d not misread
his refusal of history,
the willful pleasure he took
in a hatred I disowned long ago,
no differently, I have no doubt,
than that dog, under
the right circumstances,
would disown its leash,
and perhaps its master as well.
I don’t remember much
about my own opportunity,
except that I was standing
in my sophomore dorm hallway
while a man from a country
I knew nothing about,
except that I knew nothing,
looked at me with disbelief.
“You really believe those mothers
love their sons so little
that they bring them into the world
just to make them martyrs?”
I had not said exactly that,
but it was my meaning,
as its hatred was,
in poem after poem,
the lie that poet embraced.
I started to ask if the dog was friendly,
but the woman spit out, “Come!”
and pulled him hard into the gutter.
I let my question sink back into silence,
which I thought at first
was how I should respond
to that poet’s betrayal
of this art that saved my life,
but then I wrote the review.
It’s in the world. I want to know
what difference it has made.
Richard Jeffrey Newman has published three books of his own poetry, T’shuvah (Fernwood Press 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017), and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), as well as three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications 2004 & 2006), and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press 2011). He curates the First Tuesdays reading series, is the Executive Director of Newtown Literary, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College.