NVN Thursday: THE BETRAYAL OF TIKKUN OLAM
by Beth Heller
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To repair the world, they said, was our duty and our privilege and the reason for our continued existence Israel was supposed to be the place where this work was embodied and my body was put to use in its garden I carried water in buckets My 15 year old arms reaching toward trees planted in the name of hope We looked across the border into barren desert and felt pride And this was the mistake This pride in green fields on one side and desert on the other We thought it meant they didn’t care or couldn’t do the hard work of growing We thought we had the right and the power And that THEY did not And that THEY only wanted bombs and rage This pride is the killer the border, the dividing line between right and wrong When all we had to do was step over a nonexistent line in the sand drawn by meddlers and offer a hand Now it is too late The healing has flipped to genocide in no other name than power The thing that was planted was hate on both sides of the fence Tikkun Olam is for all of us A responsibility and a privilege And the path is a walk through a rain of blood nurturing nothing Same as it ever was in this desert where humanity has wandered far too long Blame us Blame them Blame everyone Or not, but walk Walk that path towards oasis The one fountain contained in our bodies everywhere The same blood pumps through all of us The same blood stains the ground on either side of the fence The same blood calls out for peace
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Beth Heller’s poetry has appeared in a variety of chapbooks and anthologies, including those of the Austin International Poetry Festival, the Houston Poetry Fest, Wild Word: Poets of the Gunnison Valley, and Fools Court Press, Houston, as well as newspapers and journals such as the Mountain Gazette, Fungi Magazine, and most recently and after a decades-long absence from public poeming, Medicine for Minds & Hearts: a MycoAnthology of poems inspired by a love of mushrooms, Fungi Press. She moves around but is currently nested in Western North Carolina