When stupefied

I thank my dear friend Mimi for speaking of the shocked and stupefied stillness and silence that has afflicted millions of us around the world. A lifetime’s leaning into poetry to express the depths in me finds itself just now at complete and utter loss. I read a young mother’s patient daily record of events in her beloved Ukraine. Times spent in Israel and Palestine have been among the most seminal of my life. I hear the echoes of conversations in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv and Tiberias as though they happened moments ago. I feel again the hugs, the prayers, the smiles, the tears, the painstaking work of arbitration, the wisdom forged in fire – and know them as sacred experience. Beloved faces flash before my eyes. Meals meticulously prepared and shared stand out as places of the deepest human encounter. But today I don’t know what to say. I have no words. Poems are silent. I know only that, with or without words, millions of us will and must reach and yearn and pray – for our family, the human family, ‘there’ and everywhere, every day.

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