TALKING ABOUT TREES

by Bonnie Naradzay

 

 

Father of Baby Shot Dead by IDF in Hebron: I Stopped When Asked, Then They Opened Fire. 'The soldier was about ten meters away from me. He saw me, he saw my wife and the children. The car windows were not dark, it was daylight and everything was clear. You can't say he didn't see that it was a family,' Fahed Abu Haykal told Haaretz, June 6, 2026.
 

I’d like to write like Tu Fu, whose poems
are like branches of trees reflected in water –
 
the branches of trees.  Like a group of trees seen
through clouds or mist, they appear, then disappear.
 
But I learned that today Israeli forces murdered
a Palestinian baby, in the West Bank, in Hebron.
 
He was in his mother’s arms, in a car the soldiers
shot into. They’d ordered the driver, the baby’s father,
 
to stop, and he did as they said, and raised his hands
in submission. The baby’s mother sustained shrapnel
 
injuries near her heart, may not survive.  The soldiers
had been standing idly in the street. After firing
 
into the car, they walked unconcernedly away from
their carnage. Today in Gaza City, Israelis aimed
 
a drone at the Jawazat camp for people who’d been
displaced. The drone killed seven, wounded 15 others. 
 
How can I honor the lives of Palestinians?  Like a group
of olive trees, they are destroyed and made to disappear.


Bonnie Naradzay is the author of Invited to the Feast (Slant Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Journal of Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, The Georgia Review, Cumberland River Review, Dappled Things, New Letters, Poet Lore, Rhino, Innisfree, and many other journals.  While at Harvard University’ graduate program, she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Poetry.”  She was a winner of the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize (a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary). Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She is a 2017 graduate of the St John’s College Graduate Institute. She has led poetry classes at the DC Women’s Jail and currently leads weekly poetry sessions at Street Sense and at a retirement community both in Washington, DC.   

BAI TASHCHIT (DO NOT DESTROY)

by Lenore Weiss

Israeli settlers and soldiers killed three Palestinians in their village near Ramallah on Saturday night, the third deadly attack in a week of surging Israeli violence across the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers have shot dead five civilians during invasions of Palestinian olive groves, villages and grazing land, in the brief period since Israel and the US launched a new war on Iran at the end of February. —The Guardian, March 8, 2026. Photo: WAFA archive.

Deer bite off the heads of my coreopsis, yellow sunbursts of blossoms I was hoping to see every morning outside my window, but now only sad stumps are left leaning against the pavement. Every day, I go outside to encourage the plant, hoping it might grow back, sprout a few new leaves. The way olive trees are being cut, burned and poisoned, and the olive, which is more than a fruit, a symbol of resistance, buckets picked and pressed with a wooden beam, sometimes with a stone to produce golden flowing oil. Every tree which is not being harvested, is lost to the occupation. Deuteronomy 20:19-20 prohibits cutting down fruit-bearing trees during a war as they provide life-sustaining food. Isn’t this an ongoing war? Olive trees growing in the West Bank are the first to go, surrounded by settlements built high on ridges that strangle villages, and even when armed renegades desist, they return with more venom. Concentration camps and the multitude of prisons throughout the United States produce men and women who understand how physical space can be controlled, minds never. Villagers living in Burin say their olive oil is spicier because it is laced with tear gas.

Lenore Weiss’s novel Pulp into Paper and a poetry collection, Video Game Pointers were both published in 2024. Prior poetry collections form a trilogy about love, loss, and being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012), Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014), and The Golem (Hakodesh Word Press, 2017). Alexandria Quarterly Press published her prize-winning flash fiction chapbook Holding on to the Fringes of Love. Lenore edited a poetry and prose anthology for Kehilla Community Synagogue entitled From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of the 21st Century. She is a member the Writers Grotto and serves as the Associate Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Editor for the Mud Season Review.