NVN Monday: Metaphors for War
“ MIDDLE EAST COUPLES COUNSELING” by Felicia Nimue Ackerman and “POUNDING” by Tasneem Khan
MIDDLE EAST COUPLES COUNSELING
by Felicia Nimue Ackerman
Graphic by Marta Monteiro
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France’s top diplomat Stephane Sejourne said Saturday his government will put forward a draft resolution at the UN Security Council setting out a “political” settlement of the Gaza war. Speaking at a press conference in Cairo, he said the text will include “all the criteria for a two-state solution” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the peace blueprint long championed by the international community but opposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. —The Times of Israel, March 31, 2024
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Two states would be the road to peace, An end to the despair. But both sides are like little kids Who haven’t learned to share.
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Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 280 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, The Galway Review, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had two previous poems in The New Verse News.
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POUNDING
by Tasneem Khan
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It’s such a menial act. Mundane really. With a pestle nestled between my fingers, I fling a handful of peppercorns into a mortar. They have no time to settle, no space to jostle; no air to breathe. Who cares? I proceed. To bash their heads in. Unceasingly. As I hear no sounds, other than the satisfying thwack of wood on stone. I pound pound pound till their insides are squeezed out of their skins. And what is left is a fraction of what once was. I think about them—the peppercorns, the pestle, and the powdery remains as I glance at the newspaper. ‘Gaza pounded,’ it says. Sometimes, journalists do get it right.
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Tasneem Khan is an elementary teacher and lives in Bengaluru, India.
So eerily right on ... yes the sounds, the images, got it right, sadly