This War
On my car radio, NPR reports the funeral,
at Jerusalem’s military cemetery, of a soldier
killed in the fight with Hezbollah.
His classmate, speaking in lilting
English, praises the dead
boy’s love of hiking, love of country,
his commanding officer—translated
matter-of-factly, and roundly, as if
giving a recipe—praises his modesty
and enthusiastic participation; and I feel how
repeated and repeated and made ordinary
by repetition these gestures are, until—
from another planet, his mother’s voice
rises from the wellspring
of pure grief, and I hear grief thickening
her Hebrew, so that even the flat
translation vibrates with it
My Yonatan, my Yonatan
my own tears spring with hers
I have loved you from the moment
you were born
and the windshield blurs.
I think of my own grown
American children, and my stomach
clenches, Stop!
Yet there is this brief, strange
exaltation of pain ascending through
the ceiling of the day into rarer air,
an exaltation of being pulled up short
by the ultimate, a terrible Hollywood aura
of war movie glamour, that deadens
the boredom of the quotidian—
the boredom of my current run
to the supermarket for orange juice
and a Rotisserie chicken for dinner—
a tiny bitter nub of attraction
I squinch my eyes against
and rub out.
It can’t be that luxurious frisson—
can it?—that makes a mother say “I’m not sad
about my kids. Now they’re martyrs
in heaven”? That makes a dry-eyed
commanding officer approve
the sacrifice of youth? Powerlessness
or pride then, propaganda? The romance
of a meaningful death must be so brief.
I roll my cart past robust vegetables
refreshed with mist and remember
reading what that Lebanese
mother first said—her tongue
dust-heavy in the galloping dust of Qana:
she heard one of the babies
pinned against her back in the rubble
cry, but she couldn’t move;
she thought Fatima and Roqaya,
still warm, still lived…
Here, I leave the clear and beautiful
aisles, I take home my cold, clean
orange juice, so sweet in a dusty
throat, my glistening chicken
dripping into its plastic pan,
though I am ashamed
to love them because Yonatan’s mother cries,
because there is only dust
in Qana, because my own children
are so safe, for now,
on an American coast.
First appeared in Calyx; collected in Shimmer (WordTech
Editions, 2012).