AND THEN

by Debbie Benson

The New York Times

then came bees the sizev cats- they

overtook the sky

2put a stop2 our, wherever it was we 

were going? 

they told us we’d failed 2 really see 

our world, 

dizzying us w/eyes like sharded glass.

they dove & purred, unruly w/ yellow, 

nonpoisonous 

if fearsome, aghast but all unwarring,

& w/ them hopes we’d been ignoring 

were dipping also soaring

Debbie Benson’s recent poems appear (or are forthcoming) in Indiana Review, Passages North, Bennington Review, Ninth Letter, and The Penn Review. Past awards include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Vern Cowles Prize, an International Merit Award from Atlanta Review, inclusion in Best New Poets, and a “Best of the Net” nomination. She is a prior contributor at The New Verse News. She works as a clinical psychologist in NYC.

WHAT THE LIVING HAVE SEEN

by Lynne Rappaport

Donate here.

How many days has it been now, since 10/7,

that those Israelis held captive in tunnels in Gaza

have been without their freedom,

separated from all of life?

 

Their faces are plastered onto giant posters

for passersby in Tel Aviv to see,

burning these hostages’ plight into memory,

their country longing for it to end.

 

What can the prisoners know of the crisis above the tunnels?

The violence, devastation, rubble, blocked aid trucks, hunger,

children’s lives cut short.

Failed attempts at a lasting ceasefire.

Instead, more retaliations, an eye for an eye,

an endless war.

 

Bring them safely home.

Let them begin healing.

 

The Palestinian family I’m sending money to in Gaza—

Home destroyed, living in a tent,

subsisting on lentils and hot salt water—

Had a moment of joy welcoming a baby boy,

Husband venturing out to buy overpriced flour

for his wife and 2-year-old son. 

She needed medication to prevent blood clots,

needs nourishment to sustain their newborn child. 

They all need superhuman strength.

 

Almost 500 online donors, sending funds for a year,

trying to keep this family going, give them some hope. 

Will they rebuild their home in Gaza someday? How will they manage until then?

Will Gaza even still exist for them? Will they be displaced again?

Will these two children who’ve survived ever know a free Palestine?

What can the Gazans know of the air raid sirens, during the night,

Families hurrying to bomb shelters and safe rooms

In Tel Aviv apartment buildings?

 

Bring all safely home. 

End the occupation,

The unholy bloodshed.

 

The ghosts of the lost ones permeate the ashen air. 

Restless dreams, nightmares, 

and oh,

what the living have seen,

have seen,

have endured.

Author’s note: This poem came out of a freewrite session to the poem “Beannacht” by John O’Donahue, in Kathryn Santana Goldman’s Your Write to Resilience OLLI class, summer 2025.

Lynne Rappaport is a 72-year-old woman originally from New York who has lived in San Francisco for over 50 years. Retired from teaching ESL to immigrant adults, she enjoys poetry, nature, music, and Tai Chi. She dedicates this poem to her late cousin, Canadian poet Bobbie Ogletree, and to our late grandfather Jacob B. Sacks, born in Palestine (Jerusalem) in 1888. He immigrated to New York in 1912. 

OUR ENEMIES SUTRA

by Laurence Musgrove

AI generated graphic from Shutterstock

This evening, the Buddha and I 

sat and scrolled through our phones

before retiring for the night.

I read to him about the latest

retaliation strikes in Syria and Iraq,

and he read to me about our deportation

flights of refugees deep into Mexico

designed to discourage their return

and the hopes of those now streaming

to our razor-wired border.

“It was Thich Nhat Hanh,” he said,

“who wrote our enemies are not people,

but our ideologies, fears, and attachments

to views that justify our ignorance

of cause and effect with absolutely

no guarantee of freedom or peace.

The fires we spread always burn us, too.”

Laurence Musgrove is the author of three poetry collections Local Bird, The Bluebonnet Sutras, and A Stranger's Heart. He teaches creative writing and literature from a Buddhist perspective at Angelo State University in West Texas.

LET GO THE HEAVY HANDS OF HATRED

by Eliot Katz

The Massacre of the Innocents by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael ca. 1512–13, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hamas has taken Israel by surprise and undertaken immoral, large-scale 
terror attacks from Gaza, breaking national gates, sending hundreds 

of deadly missiles into populated towns, riding rifled motorcycles and flying 
machete gliders, brutally murdering more than 800 innocents, including 

at a kibbutz and a music festival, injuring thousands, kidnapping over 
100 civilians to bring into Gaza for human shields or prisoner-exchange 

ransom. Under its most extreme far-right government yet, Israel has quickly 
begun ruthless retaliation, cutting off all electricity, food, and water to Gaza, 

bombing high-rise apartments, schools, hospitals, killing and injuring entire 
families, creating a district of thick post-explosion gray smoke through which 

there is no ability to distinguish between Palestinians who support Hamas 
violence or not, in such a small, densely populated strip of land. The targeting 

of civilians by both sides is a violation of international law. Netanyahu says 
his army warns civilians in Gaza to leave before the bombs fly, but Gaza’s 

exits have been blocked years by Israel and Egypt. Netanyahu warns 
of the kind of devastating destruction that will “reverberate for 

generations” and that he secretly hopes will make Israeli voters forget his large 
intelligence failure. I have long written and demonstrated to support 

an end to oppressive occupation of Palestine and a peaceful two-state solution 
that looks to be moving further into the distant horizon with every bullet 

shot. Even here in New York City, there have already been physical fights 
between supporters of each side, each group carrying their heavy 

nationalistic flags of anger and war. Doesn’t it begin to hurt one’s shoulder
muscles, low backs, fragile necks on both Israeli and Palestinian sides 

to carry such heavy flags of resentment and revenge for so many decades 
now? Wouldn’t it be much easier on the body to carry the much lighter 

flags of international peace and cooperation, and to hold them upward 
toward the skies for the next two hundred years?

Called “another classic New Jersey bard” by the late Allen Ginsberg, Eliot Katz is the author of seven books of poetry, including Love, War, Fire, Wind and Unlocking the Exits, as well as a prose book, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg. His most recent poetry book was a free pdf volume posted on his website before the 2020 presidential election, entitled: President Predator: Poems to Help Make America Trump-Free Again. He was a co-founder, with Danny Shot, of the long-running Long Shot literary magazine, and was a co-editor with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Clausen of Poems for the Nation. Katz, whose late mother was a Holocaust survivor, has worked for many years as an activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes, including helping to create several housing and food programs for homeless families in Central Jersey that remain ongoing. He currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.