All night I was ransacked by dreams of walls aflame inside a burning home, the roar of bombs exploding inside my head, the ancient collective memory of grabbing tiny hands and scrambling over rubble, breath caught and garroted by terror, incomprehension, despair. The children's lips parched, eyes sunken, dark smudges circling their vacant stare, not enough water in their bodies for tears. More than a thousand Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed in seven days, compared to less than five hundred Ukrainian children in a year. The merciless calculus of war. And the haunted gaze of family members on the other side of the chain link fence, the Israeli father in America who saw his wife and young daughters kidnapped by Hamas on camera, now waiting with hollow eyes for news of his beloveds, held somewhere in the territory where the bombs fall. The horror that started this latest round of war is unimaginable, brutal, godless. The horror it has spawned is equally so. I refrain from posting about all this on social media, aware that the roots of this conflict pierce deeper than I can express, much less grasp, in two hundred characters or two thousand. In waking life, I try to keep faith with my Jewish friends, and my Palestinian friends, as images of broken humanity on both sides rip through my dreams, and I come back to consciousness with heart hammering, as if it is happening to me, because in some sense it is happening to all of us, though this time some of us watch from a distance, our bodies whole, our homes intact, our heads sheltered from the smoky sky. Even so, the children are all our children. We own this centuries old horror. It feels almost useless to pray, to make phone calls to recorded lines, to hold my friend's hand as she cries, but I don't know what else to do.
It's a nightmare, Rosemarie. I don't have the answers. I hope for peace but it seems hopeless.
ReplyDeleteMy whole life I have been waiting for the awakening, for the peace that would come from it, for the moment I could finally exhale and let the tears of joy roll down my cheeks. My whole life and for the many thousands of years before I even took my first breath, the peace we know could happen has eluded us. I ask the people in power why that is... why?
ReplyDeleteAll I can think is that there is something deeply and inherently wrong with human beings. I can see no other reason for war which is so indiscriminate in its bloody wrath.
ReplyDeleteThe horror of this conflict is heartbreaking and overwhelming. When will it end?
ReplyDeleteHave not known what to say as inchoate feelings continue to surface about the sorrow of war. This morning what came to me is that on both sides yet another generation of children is being formed and traumatized or is being killed as a result of war. The end of innocence. The beginning of experience. Repeated from time out of mind. Clearly no easy answers. No empathetic act too small. Thank you for writing from your heart, my friend.
ReplyDeleteThank you. This is the best description I have read of how I feel. I have been unable to express it, and now I have found this and I can. You write so very, very well. It amazes and inspires me.
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