Just because I love my garden and pond

Hi everyone! Over the weekend, my husband and I were doing long-overdue weeding of the garden, and I was just struck over how much I love working in the garden, even weeding on a sweaty day. I also love that we have all sorts of animals living on our property: snapping turtles, a family of muskrats, a groundhog we call Mr. Berryman. We also get lots of visitors in our pond. And I decided over the weekend that I would blog about the garden and the pond just because I love it. (The world can take a little joyful Joy, can't it?)

This morning, a rainy day when we're supposed to get thunderstorms all day (which means we can't go to the group playdate we were planning -- such is life in a place where it rains in summer -- since I love to be cozy in my house when it rains, I don't mind), we got this visitor in the pond.

It's hard to see. Is it a great blue heron or a sandhill crane? I'm not sure. Great blue herons, so I've read, have yellow bills and this one definitely has a black bill more like a sandhill crane. But sandhill cranes have red on their heads and when I zoomed on the photo, I couldn't see any red. But no matter the name of the bird, it's beautiful and stately and slow. I gratefully accept the blessing of this visitation! (This same bird, I'm pretty sure, visited us last week too, when I had potatoes to peel for cottage pie, something that often takes, for me, a long time. This visitor stayed slowly stalking the water at the water's edge the entire time it took me to peel and boil the potatoes! That was also a rainy stormy day, and she stayed with me the entire time.)

I love living in the country!

March Hiatus

As you can see, I've fallen down on the job of putting out Israeli and Palestinian poems each week. I've been very busy preparing new classes and now I'm sick. So I'm going to take a March hiatus so I can get well and then back to prepping these classes. See you in April!

"Meting Out Justification: A Military Judge's Testimony"

This week's poem is my own "Meting Out Justification: A Military Judge's Testimony" published today in Blotterature's Propaganda issue.  It's on page 12.

This poem is a found poem, so in a sense it's not really mine (so can I get away with using it as my weekly Israel-Palestine poem?). It comes from the documentary, The Law in These Parts, an examination of the system of military administration in place since the Six Day War in the Occupied Territories through interviews of Israeli judges, prosecutors, and military advisors. I highly recommend it if you're interested in human rights issues.

I've never had two poems published within a week of each other before! I feel very blessed!

And today it was nearly 60 degrees! Feels like spring!

"On Arafat's Yahrzeit"

It just so happens that my "On Arafat's Yahrzeit" was published today by HEArt Online Journal: Human Equity through Art! And as you can tell by the title, it's about Israel-Palestine, so I'm counting it as my poem for the week.

The long winter seems to be letting up, and we're in for a four-day spell of rain, complete with all manner of warnings. But it's rain! It won't be that cold! I've always read that peas don't mind a little snow, so today I went and did my best to plant peas in one of my soil's-only-frozen-in-the-corner raised beds. I rarely plant my peas early enough to be good and sick and them by the time it's time to pull them up and put in the green beans, so here's hoping. We'll see what happens. But probably because I didn't start artichokes in the basement this year (after two years of meager rewards), it felt good to have my hands in the dirt again.

Elana Bell's "There are things this poem would rather not say:"

This week's poem is Elana Bell's "There are things this poem would rather not say:"

I'm thinking about how American poets announce that their poems are about Israel/Palestine this week. I was thinking about some of Irena Klepfisz's poems and Ellen Bass's "Moonlight" and thought I would spend more time with how they announced -- or really located -- their subjects, but I discovered that I couldn't find these poems online. This brings up some interesting questions about which poems get posted online and why (that aren't specific to Israel/Palestine). So instead here is a poem that never actually announces that it is specifically Israel/Palestine, but all the specific markers are there. But by not actually naming Israel or Palestine, the poem also opens up to being about the situation -- of being a remorseful person who is a member/descendant of a colonizing and ruling force, which is, alas, a more common situation than being an Israeli or a Jew. This poem is almost an apology and gives me a lot to think about. For example, what would this poem look like if it were in the voice of an American speaker to Native Americans?

Enjoy!

By the way, I'm sorry about posting this late, but last night when posting this poem was the last thing left on my to-do list, my ear started to ache; I decided rest was the best thing.

Taha Muhammad Ali's "Exodus"

This week's poem is Taha Muhammad Ali's "Exodus."

Last week I was thinking a lot about how I come to poems by Palestinian and Israeli poets with an expectation that I'll find traces of the conflict. If I don't find them, as in last week's poem, then I mark the silence. In Amichai's poem, this silence can be seen as privilege. But of course all poets write about many things; while it's safe to assume that a poet may speak to his/her own oppression or specific historical situation, it's not required. What's more, every trace of conflict in a Palestinian poet's poem may not be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When reading Taha Muhammad Ali's poem, it seems safe to assume that those who refuse to leave are Palestinians. And this may be true. But there are interesting complicating factors. The poem's title, "Exodus," has a particularly Jewish cast to it, at least to me, Exodus being the name of the book of what most people think of as the great Jewish story in the Torah/Bible -- the story of Passover, the most important holiday in the Jewish year. (Probably most Jews will agree that Passover is most important; but not all. After all, two Jews, three opinions!) At the same time, the Biblical story of Exodus was a story of leaving, not of refusing to leave, not cleaving to the land. But then there's the interesting date at the end of the poem "5.11.1983." When I look up May 11, 1983, I don't see anything. Maybe this has personal rather than political significance. But when I look up November 5, 1983, inverting the month and day as people in the Middle East do (I remember this from when I lived for a short time in Cairo), I see that's the date when a truck loaded with explosives crashed through the entrance of an Israeli compound in Tyre, Lebanon, setting off a bomb, killing 39 people and injuring more. Muslim Jihad claimed responsibility. Israel responded by striking Palestinian targets on the Beirut-Damascus Highway. So if we bring the specifics of this particular set of events into our reading of the poem, as may be suggested by the date, then who is refusing to leave? Is it the Palestinians? Is it the Israelis?

I don't know. But the poem is bigger than these answers. Enjoy!

Yehuda Amichai's "Jews in the Land of Israel"

This week's poem is Yehuda Amichai's "Jews in the Land of Israel."

This week I'm thinking about how, although Palestinian and Israeli poets do not always write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's easy to read that into their poems. With Palestinian poets, I find I often interpret conflict in a poem as being a reference to the occupation (I'm not saying such a reading is correct). With Israeli poets, like Yehuda Amichai, a wonderful poet who loved Israel and loved life, it's easy for me to see the conflict in the silence, the absence of reference to Palestinians.

So this week's poem is one I'm sure I read quite differently from its original intentions, with its "spilled blood."