WHITE FLAGS, WALKING SOUTH

by Amy Wolf

I see* you, with your white flag raised on a stick, held high.

Child on your shoulder, two little legs dangling beneath your ears,

The hand not holding the white flag is grasping your son’s ankle.

A daughter walks beside you, a wife or mother follows behind, wailing.

Out of all of the Arabic I hear in the video*, I understand only Nakba,

But that is said often. Tragedy; expulsion; we won’t be going back, it says.

Your face is dirty, I think you have not had enough water to drink,  let alone to bathe

In, for a while. You look parched.

I look for your provisions; who is carrying the clothes you might change into,

The kitchen utensils, pots, pans, mattresses.

There is only you, and your youngers and elders, and one teenager

Carrying a bundle of clothes smaller than a suitcase.

He looks baffled.

I hear the words of the soldiers, hurrying you along.

They do not step into the picture to offer water, or comfort, or rest.

They are voices. I cannot impute any kindness to them,

Although you might convince me that a forced march from home

Is marginally better than having that home bombed and brought down on your head,

Doubling neatly as your tombstone and grave.

I see you, and I see my ancestors, in line to get on the trains.

With their small bundles, and cluster of relatives.

Yes, those trains.

Don’t look away.

Didn’t we say, never again?

Didn’t we say, when you pen a people in a ghetto, then make them abandon even that

For a long death march to an unknown place where there are too many bodies and not enough

Water and food

Let alone space to lay down

Didn’t we say that was genocide?

Didn’t we swear to speak up next time?

The Trail of Tears comes to mind.

Old people falling dead on the way, and children.

Women refusing to leave their young ones, and staying next to them to die in the cold.

This is not genocide porn.

I do not enjoy these pictures.

But I have met the ghosts of earlier marches.

On a cold spring morning in TN, a long-dead woman showed me

Where she killed herself with a knife to lay beside her child.

Willing to walk to Oklahoma, but not to leave her baby behind.

She said to me, “In the hall there, you are all dancing and singing and praying and setting out food for your ancestors.

Where is our food? We lived here. Feed us.”

I set out food for them, and prayer and song, and took the memory with me.

The humans walking from Gaza City to Khan Younis will be on that road for a long time,

Haunting all of those to come. Rebuking any who try to move into that space

With the same demand, dead or alive. “We live here; feed us.”

Centuries from now, should mankind survive on this planet,

You will still be able to see a line of white flags heading north to south,

Hear the sound of shuffling feet tired beyond reckoning of lifting up and setting down,

Listen to the cries of children and  the wailing of their mothers.

People like myself will be called in to do space clearings

And we will say, “I can’t tell them to leave. They live here. Just feed them.

Honor them.”

To my Jewish relatives I say this; you do not honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust

By consenting to and cheering on and excusing

A forced march

To crowded conditions

With little food

And less water.

Don’t you remember?

This is how it starts.

*The videos referenced by the speaker in this poem can be viewed here and here.

Amy Wolf is an LMT and energy worker who resides in Seattle, WA, and is studying writing.

THINKING OF UKRAINE / LIVING IN INDIAN COUNTRY

by Dick Altman

in New Mexico

Smoke and fire, Ukraine’s signature  in the morning

paper, tells the physical story. Lines of people leading

to nowhere.  Second day headline to yesterday’s photo

of a pregnant woman on stretcher in front of a bombed

hospital: Mother-to-be dies.  The configuration of living,

dying, dead looms out of history’s mists, as I look

across pueblos of Rio Grande’s valley.  The great pall

of misery that binds Ukraine and Indian Country.

Treaties broken. Tectonics of people, like moving

land masses, shifting, transforming the human

landscape.  People driven like herded cattle, to slaughter. 

America’s East cleansing the Native heartland. Manifest

destiny’s tsunami sweeping Indians aside, all the way

to the Pacific.  Cultures’ flesh and bone left to decompose

on prairie, high desert plains, lowlands.  Dig up

the nameless graves, if you can find them.  The soil doesn’t

distinguish between Indian and Ukrainian. Worms eat

to the same bone.  Digital worms in one monumental hack

could disarm America’s defenses.  Shut down the grid. 

Prevent plane and missile from launching.  Go to sleep

in the dark and wake, ten hours later, to discover thousands

of alien aircraft have landed all over America.  And you

discover you no longer live in the land of the free.  You

want to escape, but to where.  Software that runs your car

has been high-jacked.  Look out to the street and strange

uniforms shove your neighbors into a line.  Like

American soldiers dismantling Indian villages that believed,

by treaty, the land was theirs.  Like Ukrainians waking

to ground and aerial attack.  Living on New Mexico’s

high desert plain, at seven thousand feet, might seem like

I’m literally above it all.  This is Indian Country.  My stock,

though not  my   eastern  European  forebears, nearly

obliterated Indigenous territory. Across the street and down

the  block, survives a   ten-foot   square of sacred, protected

ground. A metaphor of diminishment at the heart of one

civilization’s rise, another’s living burial.

 

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems.  His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.