by Heather H. Thomas
Hamas fighters stormed the Nova festival on 7 October and killed hundreds.
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The evening river is gray jade, the tree line charred pink. Rose quartz earring rescued from the roadside, shelters in my palm. I remember Jerusalem—the golden Dome of the Rock hazed out in dust storms, random stabbings canceling my trip to the Temple Mount also called Al-Aqsa Mosque. Different people worship the same places, sometimes under different names. Red alert on D’s phone—incoming missile—D says she leapt from her car into a ditch. My birthday, I sit alone in a Tel Aviv café, alarm shrieking—yet none move to shelter, everyone chatting, trusting the Iron Dome to intercept. Few can speak of it now: trance music, dawn cocktails, missile light mistaken for fireworks, then sudden noises of death— After, women’s bodies mutilated, some missing the bottom half— Survivors almost not here—eyes hollow, speechless they shake with the silence of living. The darkness you saw, we’re going to bring back the light, therapists tell them. Sometimes only a small body part remains, a finger, a foot, a hand, trace of mascara on eyelashes, an earring she put on that morning.
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Author’s Note: The poem blends details, which were reported in The New York Times and BBC, of the violence at the Nova festival, with memories of my 2015 visit to Israel. The detail of the earring was reported by the BBC as an example of tiny objects, along with actual body parts, which were all that remained of some victims.
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Heather H. Thomas is a poet from Reading, Pennsylvania, the author of Vortex Street(FutureCycle Press) and five other poetry collections. Recent work has been published in Barrow Street, Cutthroat, The New Verse News, Pedestal Magazine, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. Her work is translated into six languages, including Arabic.
This is a magnificent poem that captures the horror of what Arab Israeli’s and Israeli citizens have been going through. There has been much sympathy and writing about the suffering of the Palestinians and your poem provides a balance that we don’t often hear. Thank you for your poem. Very well done. Karen olshansky
The author brought us/me right to the roadside where that earring was found. She captures the utter impossibility of this happening now, near me ... a feeling I imagine many of us feel when disaster is at our shoulders and some part of us defends us from the oncoming reality.