October 7th Memorial
Rabbi Ye'ela Rosenfeld of Der Nister invited me to read poems as part of an October 7th memorial she was organizing at Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock. Below are my words.
Candle: Pain
כלניות, כלניות,
כלניות אדמדמות אדמוניות
כלניות, כלניות,
כלניות מטוללות חינניות.
Anemones, anemones
reddish, red-haired
Anemones, anemones
anemones of graceful dew
These lines from a popular Israeli song – written by the poet Natan Alterman and sung most famously by Shoshana Damari and Chava Alberstein - were among the first things I thought of when I heard of the October 7th attacks.
The song recounts the lifecycles of a young girl growing into a woman and into a grandmother, against the backdrop of the returning kalaniot seasons.
This season of the red flower carpets in Israel’s south is known as Darom Adom.
Darom Adom – these words used to stand for an innocent joyful beautiful phenomenon, simple pleasures of life, poppy-peeping, delicately woven into the fabric of the Israeli soul and culture.
Now, they conjure up fields of death and horror and fear and grief, thrust forever into the fabric of our Jewish souls.
Darom Adom - the red blood-soaked earth, the blood of our sisters and brothers crying out to us, to the world, to God.
Darom Adom – the photo of a young girl taken hostage, smiling into the camera, a field of kalaniot in the background
Darom Adom – a metaphor for how brutality and senseless hatred trampled down fragile sprouts, that basic human hope that in the next year, we will sit on the porch and watch the birds fly by, children playing in the fields, red poppies gently swaying.
I wanted to write a poem about that – about the song, about kalaniyot, about murder and willful destruction, about the struggle with hope. I started writing that Kalaniyot poem with a lot of pain, and I haven’t found my way back to the draft yet.
When there’s too much pain, I believe that most poetry falls short. While I, like other poets, often write from a place of pain, or regret, or hurt, or longing, when it becomes too much, I don’t write.
But there was one day, the day after October 7th - before the pain had settled fully in, before I learned that a friend had been slaughtered in Netiv Ha’Asarah, before the dimension of the horror that we know so painfully well today had unfolded - when I wrote a first poem, and that is the one I am sharing with you tonight.
The poem is a recounting of what I did and felt on October 8th – a day on which I drove down from my student pulpit in the Antelope Valley – known for a poppy season in its own right - back to Pico-Robertson.
It takes its title from another song I learned while I lived in Israel: Children of Winter.
Composed 20 years after the Yom Kippur War, it speaks in the voice of the children conceived in the aftermath of that war, pointing to the fact that there is no peace yet, and that there might never be, that the cycle of Israeli generations dying in war continues.
The neighborhood is one house of mourning
grocery shopping is a shiva call
when we look up, our neighbors’ eyes
reflect our sorrow
too much sky and too much sunlight
white tarp ripped off flimsy beams
palm fronds and myrtle branches
in the curb
How I miss the walls I beheld each day
rose-colored, desert-beige
the scent of warm stones and jasmine
frum couples on a walk at dusk
Calevi’s smile
the stray cat with turquoise eyes —
I want to pretend that what I love is near
intact
alive:
Farmers and dancers, men chanting
at dawn on Shabbat morning
women’s tzahalulim
the full moon over the Sea of Salt
hopeful orchards along Road 90 —
Along California state route 138
olive trees no longer bloom
My feet in dusty sandals
I buy local peaches, and a watermelon
and for one helpless moment
l cannot forget
our desecrated dwelling places
our scorched sanctuaries, mothers and daughters
raped and spat on
our borders trampled, babies murdered
See this land that God assigned –
I want to know where they will live
if they will live
in 50 years
the future orphans, widows, wailing fathers
all those conceived with love this winter
Candle: Courage
I mentioned just earlier how stifling and silencing pain can be to a poet. How words can feel inadequate.
Writing against the feeling of inadequacy, in the face of betrayal and absence of dignity, surrounded by pain requires courage. Admitting to our helplessness is an early first step to healing. It requires courage. When we make ourselves vulnerable, we show courage and dignity.
Courage is an affirmation of life, the expression of hope and confidence, of beginning to walk again even though the very narrow bridge that is the world doesn’t have railings.
So, for this candle I chose one of the many poems I could have chosen – after the reverberating expression of shock in the first days and weeks - ein milim, there are no words, there came an abundance of words. Yesh milim.
The poem by Eva Murciano, published in the book Shiva, edited by Rachel Korazim, with red poppies on its covers, is about writing in the face of inadequacy – an act of courage.
