A Note from the Poet: Activism for Palestine profoundly shaped my last year in college, pushing me to rethink everything I thought I knew about social movements, solidarity, and statehood. These three poems are my attempt, one year later, to capture the entanglements and possibilities of participating in activism for Palestine as Jewish student. I am grateful to the network of organizers in Northern Colorado who supported, challenged, and taught me through this tumultuous spring. Next year, may we all be free!
I. Scenes from Auraria
It rained all of yesterday. Today it’s sunny enough to dry the tents.
When we arrive, people are shaking droplets of water into the sunlight and laying the tents over a huge green tarp, making a brilliant quilt of fabric that shines in the late April sun. I can feel the water evaporating from the material, circling my shoulders in spirals, animate in its motions.
We learn the cartography of this newborn place: the central tents have snacks, first aid, dry socks; there is a tent for studying, full of books and charging-stations; a bathroom tent, add more kitty litter when the bucket is half full; we have acupuncture and massage therapy, anarchist zines for a dollar.
Young people surround the tents in concentric patterns, resting on towels with laptops and piles of notebooks. They say the written word will prepare us for what is coming. A girl underlines three sentences in pen, she asks if I am radicalized yet. Is this what a radical world could look like?
Speeches and security practice, mantras from the bullhorn — we keep us safe we keep us safe we keep us safe — and afterwards I hear a parent ask their child for curiosity. Like the four questions: why is this day and this place so different from other days and other places? The answer itself a question.
I outline the nine letters that spell PALESTINE with black sharpie, again and again, creating signs for the near future. I pet dogs and meet strangers, I read pamphlets about homelessness and mass incarceration, I text my family. I make plans for the encampment on my campus back east.
On the drive home I hold Joy Harjo’s map to the next world in my pocket, the shapes of Angela Davis’ speech in my mouth, the pages of my favorite hagaddah taped to the lampposts of my brain; the beautiful red and white one with commentary by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander.
Between fallow fields, I am imagining the world made anew, the temple rebuilt, the land free from the river to the sea, these competing visions of utopia, of zion and zionism, and for a moment I am ready to believe they will all to come to pass because I have seen it, the promised land, for five hours, in Denver.
For a brief and imperfect moment: the tents and footprints and signs and books forming a thin film over the world we currently inhabit, the water lifting away, the grass parting in waves, freedom personified. Everything suffused with hope and possibility but we are not there yet. We are still dreaming.
*
II. On the second day of the encampment
I realize that protest is as much for ourselves as for others
Walking in circles, chanting, crying out, it is like prayer
For Gaza’s children, the dead and the living
Thousands of miles away I am walking for them
I am walking for myself, to hold onto my own humanity
When we are told there is nothing to be done
Pure powerlessness, phone calls unanswered
An email template from my representative
At city council my time runs out
Words make no difference
Only footfalls on the pavement. Only students circling.
A printout in my dad’s office: the religious ceremony is life itself
That’s Peter Mathiessen, undercover for the CIA
(Hallucinogenic drugs and rituals, the snow leopard)
Things we do for ourselves and for each other in
Surviving the hell that is war, war from a distance
Above, the clarion eyes of hawks see us for what we are
The snake with her tail in her teeth, the ouroboros,
Consuming ourselves, making ourselves anew
Doing nothing. Doing all we can bring ourselves to do
A collective knowledge
A commitment
*
III. Kaddish
The first week of May it is unseasonably cold and windy. I bike to the encampment with a loaf of freshly-baked challah in my backpack, the warmth of it gathering at the base of my spine
I pedal through the wet streets. We are having a potluck tonight, between the tents and signs, in this space concentrated with things that keep our movement alive, a space that is learning and changing
Next to the challah in my backpack are fifty copies of Kaddish. There is a Shabbat service tonight and I am tasked with leading the prayers, me with my one-and-a-half years of Hebrew school
And my conspicuous lack of a Bat Mitzvah. I have been practicing Kaddish, a prayer for the dead, a prayer against forgetting, a prayer that reminds me of my grandpa, his love of pineapple-orange juice
Now, a circle forms and evening sags toward night. There is a sunset without color, a disappearing, as we say the blessings through masks there is no discernible sound but the stares of allies and the rain
The prayer is over. A great gust of wind lifts an aluminum tray of garbanzo beans and it flies for three seconds in the air and drops outside the circle, the beans scattering, a passing dog goes berserk
This must be activism — the dog snapping for garbanzos, the rush for napkins in the gale, the gathering of everything fallen and scattered. Like us, fallible and futile and outrageously funny
Eating from mismatched plates with people I have marched and chanted with, argued and prayed with. Husks of garbanzo beans hidden between the cracks in the pavement
Heading home, the storm silent overhead, these months
Made only of moments that cycle in my brain forever
