"Strange, Suspended Lives"

“I just wanted to film the strange suspended life there.” Ghassan Salhab, Lebanese Film-maker

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/world/middleeast/25beirut.html?hp&ex=1153886400&en=be1c981b68a49147&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Today at work, we talked about strange, suspended lives in the North of Israel. Unreported stories of businesses buckling, people confined to basements, stringing television wires, making do. There is fear that women missing work to take care of kids aren't being compensated, that the offices of social and civil service providers are dark. A 15 yr old girl was killed today in Magher, an Arab Village in the Galil when a rocket burst into her house.

There are men in uniform, boarding busses, heading north -
or south, east and west to fill in for others sent to up there, where there are cedars we sing about in psalms.

Still, Jerusalem's rhythms pulse on as usual.

Auto-Pilot
I spent the morning at Kol Ha-Isha
clicking
printing
collating
stapling

(things a machine could do if our organization had more money)

I want to be a machine today
I don't know what to feel

Tel Aviv, Midnight

Planes dart back and forth belting off-key songs
The kind taught to indoctrinate kids
And scare them out of breaking the rules

Dash L'Aza!
Dash L'Beirut!
Dash L'Aza!
Dash L'Beirut!

Couples cling on dimpled sand in the shadow of the water
A Haredi man lights a cigarette
Some one snaps a photo and I swear the world is ending

I missed the big fireworks here
Now I watch the people watching for war

It's too late to talk to strangers
So I let myself dissolve into the organism of a world
that's achy and messy and impossible to resist

War(ped)

I feel like I have to say something, though truthfully I don't know what to say. I don't know how to respond to broken borders and blasted buildings - to rockets of all sorts of numbers and makes, sirens, shelters, soldiers in shrouds. An editorial in Haaretz today said this violence is different than the attacks of the Intifada, because it goes beyond busses and cafes and threatens the sacred spaces of homes. People in the North are returning to shelters carved in the ground. Parents all over this bite-sized country dread phones sounding off, commanding their kids back into uniforms.

On Wednesday, I attended a conference celebrating the creation of an index with the names of 200 Israeli women of all different backgrounds to be drafted as potential peace-makers in the event of negotiations with the Palestinians. Member of Knesset and Education Minister Yuli Tamir commented that it was the first time she felt there was truly no partner for peace. Women shouted about whether that will always be the excuse no matter what or whether circuits of dialogue have shorted beyond repair.

Friday afternoon, I paced around the shuk, forraging for a deal on hummus, for a carton of grapes and spices to mix with quinoa. I heard a woman hawking something. Before I could decode her words, I could have sworn she was yelling, "The British are coming! The British are coming!" Meanwhile tourists ordered cheese in broken Hebrew, girls with their heads covered pushed disposable candlesticks and prices on everything dropped as sunset drew closer. The only alarm was in the voice of that woman,who turned out to be pawning hot borekasim (flaky pastries stuffed with cheese, potatoes or veggies).

I'm worried about how war smears everything together. Individuals and governments, speakers of the same language, Gaza and Lebanon. Years spent designing and improving, building, organizing for civil society are smoked. Missles and rhetoric reduce things to rubble and pulp. . .

I pray for restraint, for the ability of those with power on all sides to see beyond their egos. For an Israel where war won't feel so much like home.

Sunflowers

Hunched over,
Sun pinching at their necks
Waiting like refugees
with shrouded faces

There is no rain in the summer
Only blood
that passes from flesh to earth
through snarls of root and vein
to feed the shriveled skin of the sunflowers


Meduzot (Jellyfish)

Glowing globes of mystery
Thousands of universes
exhaled onto a scalloped shoreline
The sting of countless worlds that do not exist


Aussified

I want to be in a city with a grumbling stomach.
I want to roil in its appetites.
But the Jews of Vienna are pent up in Yad Vashem.

Even the ghosts here are quiet,
Strolling along trolley tracks taut as violin strings
Past the tattoo parlor on Judenstrasse,
Barely glimpsing at their monument -
A library of stone.

Vendors in powdered wigs beckon and sell,
"Bitte," "Danke," "Thank you for your visit"
As though nothing has transpired between Mozart and today

While the ghosts wave good nacht
to the gold-crusted buildings
to the marble curled like smoke.

Their silence deafens and curdles in my ears
I strike at the rock, waiting for tears.