KEEP AWAKE

by John Linstrom

Rescuers pull a child out of the rubble of a building in Khan Younis, on October 24, 2023. Photo:  Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty via The Atlantic

for Gaza

The sun darkened, and the moon,
stars falling from heaven, powers

shaken. A toddler is lifted
from a pocket of air

below a concrete slab barely held
by neighbors: her eyes are hollow planets,

dry, they stare—these are not her parents,
she had just been napping and now

the world has gone all dust and jagged.
It was very loud, then very quiet.

This child is the same age
as my own daughter

who wakes with the sun
in the crib across the hall

each day. This child is your child;
she is one of two million.

O God, that you would come down
but you nor no one ever else would be

this child’s mother, nor the quilt
to pull down from over the couch, 

the rocking chair, the picture
of the rabbit at the end of the hall,

the pitcher of juice, the stuffed dog. This child
will now be fed the bread of tears: you

have given her tears to drink. This night
is too dark, carries no answer, and the only words

that come in the furtive inky air are keep awake. 
When she cries, what father will come in to lift her 

in the night? Keep awake. Was there a sibling
for whom those dry eyes moistened? Keep awake.

O God, that you would come down and shield
these children from the blinding grief that falls

with hate, from the ancient territorial tragedy
as we grasp for the revealing of some balm

this child is stricken to the root
deeper than tears, than her voice

and my God may we keep awake, for all
our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth

until we cry out for this stricken girl
and for her loose our voices and

O God kindle our brushwood souls
and fire our water to boiling—powers shaken,

restore us that we might be saved from this,
that all might be saved in this night

for yes, I see, you have come down
and are there: crushed beneath the stone,

and there, sprinting over, lifting boulders, and
there: neighbors lift you and you stare

out among us as stars fall from heaven
and staring, wordlessly demand,

for every child, for every shining light
threatened in the falling night, to keep awake.

John Linstrom’s first collection of poems To Leave for Our Own Country is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April of 2024. This poem, “Keep Awake,” was written in his role as Poet in Residence at Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish in Manhattan and was read in worship for the First Sunday in Advent. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Northwest Review, North American Review, and The Christian Century. He is the series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press, making available the works of environmental poet-philosopher L. H. Bailey (1858-1954). John holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University. He lives with his wife and their young daughter in Queens, NY.

TO GEORGE, THROUGH THE ORANGE PLAINS OF SKY

by John Linstrom

George Winston, a pianist and composer whose unadorned melodies sought to evoke seasonal rhythms of nature and became a signature style of New Age music in the 1980s with popular albums such as Autumn and December, died June 4 in Williamsport, Pa. He was 74. —The Washington Post, June 9, 2023

Today I heard you’d died.
It’s been a strange day.
Wildfire smoke swept from Quebec
down the Atlantic seaboard

and darkened the air of Manhattan
where years ago I saw you play
a benefit concert with my wife
who I was only dating then—

a moon hung above the stage
where you sat and your fingers
stretched over the cold keys
pulling forth arpeggiated chords

from my memory. Your album
December the only thing my mother
could listen to when giving birth.
Today I wonder what labor falls

upon the lands of Canada, the airs

of home, while frightful golden plains
bridge the continent as thick fallen sky,
the smell filtered through spectral masks we

kept too ready, and George, I want to know
what we will do without you, without
your hands and heart, what the land will be

without passing through the mystery of your mind.

John Linstrom’s first book of poetry, To Leave for Our Own Country, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. Linstrom is a writer, a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum in New York City, and the Series Editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Northwest Review, Writers Resist, North American Review, The Christian Century, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in Queens.