NVN Wednesday: 2 more poems as war rages
LET GO THE HEAVY HANDS OF HATRED by Eliot Katz and TERRITORIAL DISPUTES by Karen Olshansky
LET GO THE HEAVY HANDS OF HATRED
by Eliot Katz
The Massacre of the Innocents by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael Raffaello Sanzio or Santi ca. 1512–13, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Hamas has taken Israel by surprise and undertaken immoral, large-scale terror attacks from Gaza, breaking national gates, sending hundreds of deadly missiles into populated towns, riding rifled motorcycles and flying machete gliders, brutally murdering more than 800 innocents, including at a kibbutz and a music festival, injuring thousands, kidnapping over 100 civilians to bring into Gaza for human shields or prisoner-exchange ransom. Under its most extreme far-right government yet, Israel has quickly begun ruthless retaliation, cutting off all electricity, food, and water to Gaza, bombing high-rise apartments, schools, hospitals, killing and injuring entire families, creating a district of thick post-explosion gray smoke through which there is no ability to distinguish between Palestinians who support Hamas violence or not, in such a small, densely populated strip of land. The targeting of civilians by both sides is a violation of international law. Netanyahu says his army warns civilians in Gaza to leave before the bombs fly, but Gaza’s exits have been blocked years by Israel and Egypt. Netanyahu warns of the kind of devastating destruction that will “reverberate for generations” and that he secretly hopes will make Israeli voters forget his large intelligence failure. I have long written and demonstrated to support an end to oppressive occupation of Palestine and a peaceful two-state solution that looks to be moving further into the distant horizon with every bullet shot. Even here in New York City, there have already been physical fights between supporters of each side, each group carrying their heavy nationalistic flags of anger and war. Doesn’t it begin to hurt one’s shoulder muscles, low backs, fragile necks on both Israeli and Palestinian sides to carry such heavy flags of resentment and revenge for so many decades now? Wouldn’t it be much easier on the body to carry the much lighter flags of international peace and cooperation, and to hold them upward toward the skies for the next two hundred years?
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Called “another classic New Jersey bard” by the late Allen Ginsberg, Eliot Katz is the author of seven books of poetry, including Love, War, Fire, Wind and Unlocking the Exits, as well as a prose book, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg. His most recent poetry book was a free pdf volume posted on his website before the 2020 presidential election, entitled: President Predator: Poems to Help Make America Trump-Free Again. He was a co-founder, with Danny Shot, of the long-running Long Shot literary magazine, and was a co-editor with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Clausen of Poems for the Nation. Katz, whose late mother was a Holocaust survivor, has worked for many years as an activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes, including helping to create several housing and food programs for homeless families in Central Jersey that remain ongoing. He currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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TERRITORIAL DISPUTES
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by Karen Olshansky
Marin spotted owl population under threat from newcomers. Proposed government strategy seeks to eliminate invasive barred owls. —Marin Independent Journal, October 10, 2023.
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The Barred Owl with its stoic demeanor chest puffed feathers perched in wooded river bottoms or swamps poked with trees sit staunchly like the dead wood where they perch guarding, watching with still eyes, baritone song filling the forrest who cooks for you who cooks for you who cooks for you sometimes silent in search for food and prey the Spotted Owl an innocent target brother eating sister attacks, the cruelty of nature birds mirror the disregard for one of their species uncaring, mean, violent, nature wins over evolution that calls for reason, kindness, compassion instead of the entrapments of violence a world driven by base instincts of brains riven with ripping out each other’s identity, that fear replacement, smoke obscuring humanity.
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Karen Olshansky lives in Marin County, California with her husband and a well fed Koi named Pickle Face. Dismayed by our world gone mad, she writes poetry in order to maintain her sanity. Her work has appeared in The Literary Nest, Tuck magazine, The News Verse News, and the anthologies: Lingering in the Margins, Unsealing Our Secrets, and Unspoken.
Yay Karen!! Congratulations!