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Thursday
Pastor Sue Schmidt has alerted me to two timely poems posted on the website of Salt, a “not-for-profit production company dedicated to the craft of visual storytelling.” One is by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the other by Arab American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, daughter of a Palestinian refugee. As people become unhinged in their response to the horrific events unfolding in the Middle East, these poems do what poems do best, which is remind us what really matters.
Amichai’s poem starts with a bomb—it could have been delivered by any of the warring parties—and then proceeds to move outward to all it has touched. Describing the effect as circles rippling outward, as though from a stone thrown into a pond, Amichai begins with the diameter of the bomb; looks at those whom it directly impacted in its seven-meter radius; mentions the slightly further-out hospitals and graveyard to which the victims have been carried (“a larger circle of pain and time”); and then reaches out to the city in which one of the victims is now buried (“at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers”) and the “solitary man” who mourns her death “at the distant shores of a country far across the sea.” By now, the poet observes, the circle has enlarged considerably, encompassing the entire world.
But the circle doesn’t end with the world since the cries of those who have been orphaned ascend to God on his throne. “A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in his holy habitation,” promises Psalm 68, while the god of Exodus declares, “You shall not take advantage of any widow or fatherless child. If you take advantage of them at all, and they cry at all to me, I will surely hear their cry…” In other words, the circle now encompasses all of creation.
By ending his poem with a vision that goes beyond the throne of God to an endless circle with no God, I hear the poet rejecting specific cultural gods (including those who are envisioned as sitting on thrones) to something wider and more expansive. Destruction may begin with a circular bomb, but in Amichai’s expansive vision, we go beyond circles, boundaries, and religions to a vision of creation all bound together.
The Diameter of the Bomb
by Yehuda AmichaiThe diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
The second poem is similar. Whether through a bomb blast or something other disaster, the speaker talks of losing everything. This includes that which we have carefully saved, the future we counted on, and comforting landmarks. Only after such losses, she writes, can we know “what kindness really is.”
In this drama, life becomes an endless bus ride through desolate landscapes, which could involve interior depression as well as outward travel. On the journey, the poet speaks of seeing and identifying someone dead by the side of the road and realizing
how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Learning about kindness, then, involves “the other deepest thing,” which is sorrow. We must get to know this sorrow because, in doing so, we catch “the thread of all sorrows” until we see “the size of the cloth”—which I assume to be all of suffering humanity. In the face of such universal sorrow, we come to conclude that it is “only kindness that makes sense anymore.”
Being newly aligned with deep kindness helps us get up in the morning, leave the house, and go out into the world. Kindness at this point becomes a shadow and a friend that accompanies us everywhere. We appreciate its “tender gravity” when someone is kind to us in a moment of crisis and also when we gaze at the crowd and see someone who needs kindness from us. It is at such moments that we fully realize how precious this friendship is.
The mention of kindness puts me in mind of the prophet Micah declaring that all that is asked of us is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God.” Nye deepens our understanding of what this kindness involves.
Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
If these poets, with direct connections to the warring parties in the Middle East, can step beyond the hostilities and embrace all of suffering humankind, the rest of us should be able to do so as well.
