I’m sorry if this poem hurts
and here is a piece of sterile gauze
to bite down on
if it causes pain.
You say, by email, that Miriam’s son
came through his surgery fine
though there were a few hours after that
his pain meds did not kick in.
He’s in a hospital, in Israel.
It’s early November, 2023.
He’s had repair for Crohn’s.
I sympathize. I say, that’s hard.
And I mean this. And yet I also know
that 75 miles away from him
the hospitals in Gaza
have run out of morphine
and they’re amputating
children’s arms and legs with only
sterile gauze for them to bite down on.
Is one pain worse? Or are they equal?
You say you cannot think of this.
You’re all numbed up. It’s exhausting.
And it’s war. What can I tell us both
about imagination, or empathy,
when the distance between you
and them is 75 miles
and the distance between you
and me is several thousand?
When I’m just sitting here, trapped,
by ancient laws of geometry
and death? I can say this: triangulation
brings some clarity. Maybe the distance
just makes the tip
of the triangle sharper.
It becomes a needle.
Oh, I’m feeling it. You’re on the duller end,
but, Nomi, I know you’re feeling
other sharp tips too,
triangulated out from long
ago, and far away. Farther than October 7,
farther than your sons in Gaza.
Echoes of pogroms,
Auschwitz. Yes, I know and see those
too. “I get your points.”
I know you feel them.
How is it we can see pain
better even, sometimes, when it
comes from far away?
Is this referred pain? Or deferred?
Something of our own pain
suppressed, perhaps, kept in? Is this
all their pain, or is it mine?
I’ll tell you this: when I saw those
protesters, in the US Congress,
with their arms raised,
with their bloody hands
I thought of my daughter
and the text she sent to me
this summer. It was a picture
of her bloody hands.
She wrote: “I like the sight
of my own blood.”
She knew that this would hurt me.
She was right. I could feel that cut.
She was willing to sacrifice herself
to make me hurt. So vulnerable. She is her own
small human shield to her own hurt.
She was so near (75 miles), and yet so far away,
I couldn’t reach her. Authorities, laws,
and social institutions failed us.
There were walls, so many, that shut her in.
That shut me out. This was a breach. I could see then
how we’d lived so separately
for years, and side by side,
and I’d not known, or seen, her pain.
She is her own Gaza. And
I’d lived next door, in a cooler country
with better options.
There were those walls
between us. You know,
they call what she has “borderline.”
And here’s the truth too, Nomi:
I brought her pain.
I caused that, some of it.
I tell you, Nomi, this was not my intent
and something else: I had big dreams for her.
For us. But I’m bad at boundaries.
Too many times I crossed her lines.
I occupied her rightful space.
So is this why I think I understand
Gaza? The deaths of children? Pain?
Is this why I care? Nomi, you may have
imagination, insight, truth
to share with me.
I’m listening.
I’ll also try to “get your points.”
As for my parallel, I know
you may not like, accept it.
For here’s another geometric truth:
parallel lines will never intersect.
They circle the globe, the universe
endlessly, running side by side.
Though I still believe that sometimes lines
can cross, that intersections can
bring understanding, light.
But I cannot shake the world
from off its axis, or time
from off its path
to bend these lines. Yet I
still I send mine out to you
with hope that somehow
we will meet, and find
that light. I’m reaching out
with all I have
to reach and touch
and try to give:
my bloody hands.
~
Ora Alcorn is the third wife of Peter Alcorn, lost in the Atlantic in 1953. She has published widely in literary magazines in print and online.