Karen Arnold
Don’t tell me
Old white guys,
some perfectly
acceptable minority
persons of power,
maybe a few women,
in a green marble room
where,
purportedly,
meeting will
deliberate, decide
the course for
Israel and Palestine
currently
blowing each other’s
buildings and cities
to bits.
My thirteen
year old daughter
proclaimed – often loudly
impatient,
‘This relates to me how?”
I’m asking, amended,
her question – now
Gentlemen, ladies,
safe – a bit old –
free of danger-torn sleep,
answer please
Your confab cites
Gaza – Israel – war
Synonyms:
loss
bloodshed, terror – but
words never spoken
bluntly in talks:
babies, old women
teenagers
young men or women
HOW?
how?
How?
I’m trying,
I want to
believe you, believe
posing –
serious looks –
such public attention
to wholesale dying
can stop lives
exploding –
will help,
will repair,
will somehow halt hate.
Instead,
I know:
children died,
sirens cut night,
old people wept,
day followed day
bereft a
fresh start.
Instead,
suffering
reigns
continents away.
You settle for
settling for
no peace – no
settling to
grief kept at bay.
You lean
into talking,
day after day
while
wailing and
wounding
engulf
what you say.
“Watching the news about an armed conflict once again involving Israel and Gaza the screen showed the United Nations and a correspondent explained that at a “meeting tomorrow” some UN members would convene a panel to consider the best way to deal with the outbreak. What flashed in front of me were current pictures of the war in Ukraine and older clips of violent confrontations in the Middle East. I wondered then, as now, about the urgency such comfortable people would feel thousands of miles from harm’s way. What could wait for tomorrow here was a matter of life and death for the people on both sides thousands of miles away. The poem wrote itself with the voice of my young daughter providing the essential question even though she has a family of her own now.” —Karen Arnold
Stops on Karen Arnold’s literary odyssey include: ten years as Poet-in-Residence at Montpelier Cultural Arts Center, Laurel, MD; creator and moderator of veterans’ reading and discussion groups sponsored by Maryland Humanities, Baltimore libraries and cultural centers; teaching at universities in the US, Sweden, and Norway; and conducting creative writing workshops. Her poetry can be found in Border Crossings (1998), Looking for Disappearance (Finishing Line Press 2023), Trajectory, Slant, Scarlet Leaf Review, Gyroscope, Carmina, Connecticut Review, Evening Street Press, For Ukraine from Women of the World, Farmer-ish and other independent journals. Midwest roots gave her open skies, light, and space, spawning love for Atlantic shores from close by Maryland and Delaware to Maine. Her house is full of driftwood and rocks!