How much weeping does there need to be? — Assaf Gebane, Ha’aretz When I heard the explosions I was watching TV after putting the kids to bed. There was nothing on and I didn’t feel like checking the news, dear God, because how could I want to hear, over and over again, the same story. While falling asleep my son said, “I have so many stories in my pocket to tell you.” Someone’s son, another one, is dead. All his stories folded up inside the quiet earth. My son is brown, but he is not black, so he is free to get into a scuffle on the playground and come home scratched up but living. He sleeps as I step onto the terrace, as neighbors appear, one by one, heads turned to the sound. Because this is Israel and not America my first thought is Iran or Gaza, because these things are possible, because the sound of bombs or gun shots, I can’t discern between them, must have an origin story, a narrator, a villain. Because I couldn’t bear to watch the news for days I didn’t know the rage that needed to fill the streets, as it did when the booms jerked me from the stupor of the screen. Stun grenade, people are saying. I’m so tired of praying to a god who cowers from all this burning, who made the human heart capable of choosing the trigger, the human mind capable of shaping the gun. There is no such thing as accident when the gun was made for this. No such gun that could discern child from adult from child on the verge of becoming adult, no such gun that could judge the way God does, that could know the way God knows the heart of this boy who was not done growing. I am so afraid to address you, God, because you made us this way, fragile, fallible, easy to break, easily swayed to play judge. So you, dear God, be the judge. Since you can’t save us from ourselves, judge us, oh judge us, let our fury burn for your justice. Don’t console. Let the weeping of grieving mothers and fathers be heard louder than rockets. Do not break this rage. Do not soften its edge or sooth the throat from its wailing. Let our whole bodies grieve for the boy who never came home, for the man whose soul chose gun, chose shoot. No rest, no rest, for him or any one of us who witnessed this. Don’t let our rage rest just yet.

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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