April is poetry month. Last April, I read from “19 Varieties of Gazelle” at my local library’s Soup and Poetry night. Having supported the Palestinian cause for many years, I wanted to highlight the verses of Naomi Shihab Nye, whose father’s family lost their Jerusalem home to the Israelis in 1948. The renowned poet Mahmoud Darwish lost his Galilee home then, too, after his family fled the fighting, Israelis occupied his village, and returning Palestinians were denied any claim to their former homes.
The gentle poems of Lebanese American Kahlil Gibran were popular in my youth, before Israel bombed beautiful Beirut in 1982. But Arabs and Iranians, like Rumi and Omar Khayyam, have been writing luminous poetry for centuries. (The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered source material for the Bible’s creation and flood stories.) They also invented writing, math, systematic astronomy, medical devices and practices, the idea of one God, navigation devices and practices, and sophisticated irrigation systems, among countless other things.
I haven’t yet decided what I’ll read at Soup and Poetry this year. But I hope Naomi wasn’t in Gaza when the bombs fell, and that no poets or gazelles died in horrific pain, and that all Palestinians, not yet cleansed from the “promised land,” will have soup to eat, too. I believe that since before Joshua crossed the Jordan, Israel has “fed the heart on fantasies” (Yeats) of racial supremacy, occupation and violent revenge. Such bitter fare makes for neither luminous poetry nor a happy, harmonious world.
Melodie Greene
Calais
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