Happy New Year! Happy First Weekly Poem about Israel-Palestine!

I have several resolutions this year. One is to go for 100 rejections in 2018 -- to put myself out there again and again. Hopefully there'll be some acceptances in there too, but the real goal here is to get really brave.

Another resolution concerns this blog. I'd like to write here more and not let the blog languish. It seems to me that my studies in the psychology of genocide and human rights abuses have given me some insight -- or at least a different perspective -- on politics and, especially, othering. I'd like to share some of that and will be thinking of different ways of doing that in the coming days and weeks.

But more concretely, I've decided to link a poem related to Israel-Palestine here each week. (At first, I thought I would type it up here, given that actually writing someone else's poem with one's own fingers is such a great practice. But then I started researching copyright of poems on the web and found that those-in-the-know recommend not even quoting a line of someone's else's poem without explicit permission. So, linking it is!) These poems might be explicitly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or by an Israeli or Palestinian poet (though I'll probably choose it for what it suggests to me about the conflict or perspective on the conflict), or by Palestinian-Americans or Jewish-Americans explicitly or obliquely about the conflict.

This weekly link and the research to support it will help me with my own poems about Israel-Palestine. I include American poets here because sometimes poetry in translation assumes cultural information I don't have -- and certainly translations from languages as different from English as Hebrew and Arabic can sometimes leave a gulf that is difficult to cross as a reader. Since my own poems are an attempt to cross the distances between people and they grapple with how to talk about the conflict to readers who may or may not have a background in the conflict, poems by Americans here are particularly useful to me.

This week's poem is Naomi Shihab Nye's "How Palestinians Keep Warm." I'm so happy to find the poem online because I've been reading and copying certain poems out of her Red Suitcase and especially loved this one for the themes of legacy and story. Don't let me ruin it for you. Go read it at the Academy of American Poets.

For all in the northern climes, keep warm!