by Bonnie Naradzay
Israeli soldiers will not face criminal prosecution for the death of an elderly Palestinian-American man who was stopped at a checkpoint, dragged from a car, bound and blindfolded and then left unresponsive on the ground overnight after apparently suffering a heart attack due to his rough treatment. —AlJazeera, June 14, 2023. Photo: Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank village of Qafin on May 30, 2023 [File: Majdi Mohammed/AP via AlJazeera]
*
I am thinking of the role of the poet is it to read through the morning news and try on the horrors of people’s lives like today reading again about the 78year old American stopped by IDF soldiers in the West Bank at night during a “routine incursion” in the village of Jiljilya since after the man was dragged from his car for 200 meters he was gagged his wrists bound was left face down for hours in a cold warehouse with others called “detainees” by the news report that said after hours like that he was found dead but his death could not be determined to be caused “specifically” by anything the soldiers had done after leaving him which was their routine since he was also Palestinian and so the case was closed or is the job of the poet to imagine being forced to cross the border into Belarus or Mexico at gunpoint or watch again the video of the Greek Coast Guard rounding up asylum seekers, including young children, then taking them to sea, abandoning them on a raft. Or is the poet called on to describe the patterns of leaves as someone suggested to me without irony.
*
Bonnie Naradzay’s poems haver appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, EPOCH, and many other sites. She was awarded the New Orleans MFA’s poetry prize: a month’s stay in the castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. For many years, Bonnie has led regular poetry sessions at shelters for the homeless and at a retirement center, all in Washington, D.C.
This is a vitally important question, addressed brilliantly here. Food for thought. Does Bonnie Naradzay make it impossible for any poet who reads this to return to the patterns of leaves -- unless poets who write about the small particulars of their lives and of nature are able, as few greats are, to move the images to the universal, to the news to which we must react and try to remedy, with poetry?