we challenged you to write about our people who were unjust victims, he said
she knew her dislike of the pleasure of holding onto victimhood
and the image of her grandparents hurriedly dragging themselves
into their grave outside of the shtetl moved from right to left to right
she was in the challenge and sank into the confusion of where she was going
put one word in front of the other to let them know she understands their suffering
past and present mingle their suffering not now and she lost her compassion
as she entered the photograph of the demolished homes and the bulldozer they drove
into the Masafer Yatta villages like the horses galloping into the Ukrainian village of her people
their hoofs a bulldozer blade back and force she moves with garbled words
as the stories of deaths run into each other but not now not now
There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens
she remembers the line and lives only in reckoning with her people’s rupture
of cruelty her people she melds in their shadows as they chant
Death to the Arabs and her words rain drops in death valley evaporate disappear
the chanting continues the bulldozer blade dances wildly on the walls of others
About the Poem
The poem expresses the inner wrestling of Israeli rebuking Israel’s recent eviction and demolition of Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta villages in the West Bank and their loyalty to the history of Jewish suffering.
About the Author
Michal Rubin is an Israeli living in Columbia, SC. A psychotherapist, a Cantor , and a bilingual poet, her poetry and hybrid works appeared in Psychotic Education (SC, 2006) and The Art and Science of Psychotherapy (Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, 2016, and the Spring and Summer issues of 2021) and accepted for publication (2022 summer edition) in Wrath Bearing Tree journal and Rise Up Journal.