Photo: Ofir Asif
There is harm in the air
Infants caged
Children scammed,
There are guards
Bearing guns
Tearing babies from arms.
Those before us who fought
For the hunted, the hurt
Weep in graves
As the country they served
Mutates to enact
Inhumane acts
On the wrong tracks.
For Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Trains and Tracks
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
“Make me disappear,” she said,
As her eyes pleaded to be seen.
“I don’t care anymore,” she said,
As her voice begged to be heard.
The bruises on her skin long faded
But the wounding in her heart remained
Unhealed
Unchanged.
“I want to not be anymore,” she said.
But it was pain and the isolating loss of shame
She needed to erase,
Not life itself.
For The Daily Post
Photo: Dvora Freedman
In places too many
On this one blue-green ball,
Children haul
More than the weight of firewood
On their backs,
Big or small.
Sorrow, loss, illness, agony
Needs unmet
Unheard calls …
Yet they are all
Our children,
Their pain is our
Shortfall.
They are worthy of better:
In the now
For the future
For humanity’s long haul.
For The Daily Post
Photo: Amitai Asif
It is in your grasp
To take hold
To absorb
Offered light
Life’s rewrite.
It’s within your soul
To recall
To be bold
In the hollowed out space
Of your mind
To breathe deep
To grow whole.
For The Daily Post
Photo: Ofir Asif
Carve beauty
Out of woe.
Hew purpose
From the rough.
Sculpt meaning
To make good enough
What wasn’t
And yet
Somehow was
All you could
Know.
Carve beauty
Out of woe.
Find you
Inside
The flow.
For The Daily Post
The prompt for today was just too on point to ignore, when the paperback became available TODAY (!!!) and when so much of this novel is about what a home is, or what may at any moment become a place one is pushed out of or needs to run away from. The connection felt even more apt with how the holidays bring up for so many the very realities and stories of a home (or lack thereof).
“Apples in Applath” is a work of fiction, yet very real children do fall victim to policies and realities not of their choice or making. Also real is that what makes a home or family is not always immediately obvious; and that hope and wariness, need and conscience, often compete inside one’s soul as one seeks a safe space to call home.
I’m very excited for “Apples in Applath” – my fourth book and third novel. I hope you’ll check it out and share it with others who may find an interest. I hope that it may find a home in yours.
Even more so, my wish for you — and for all who are or once were children — is that you’ll always have a safe nest to call home.
For The Daily Post
What do you do when you are worried?
How do you act when you feel harmed?
If angered, wronged, misheard, left out?
What do you do when someone threatens?
How do you manage double binds
That tangle up your mind?
Do you cower away?
Do you lash out?
Do you curl into a ball under the covers
And turn off all reaction, action, light?
Does your body compensate
In sweet diversions
Or does your gut churn ire
Into acid
And shuts down?
Do you sob, mope, break down
Break something
Break someone?
Does your heart thunder in your eardrums
As your blood pressure spikes red
Behind your eyes
Or does it plummet
Grayish
Into numb?
Do you respond in kind
To wound another
To give as good as you had gotten
To show who’s boss
To cut to size any potential bully
So they stay down?
Or do you shrink
Into wall flowered corners
Get by through fading into
Silence
Till all turmoil passes
And you can seek the bits you hadn’t managed
To protect
And tentatively try to
Patch life up?
When feelings flood, how do you manage:
Float on? Hold tight? Spit out? Swirl dizzyingly in the eddies?
Drown?
What is the language of reaction
In your body?
Does your mind
Command
Reflexively
Or does it find a pause
Between a stimuli and action
To weave insight to choice
And sort true danger from benign?
Do you collapse
Into outdated paths
Formed by a not-good-enough childhood
And unhealed histories
Still near
Or has your palette widened
To allow volition
Over instinct
And
Kindness — to yourself, to others —
To find courage
Over fear?
For The Daily Post
Can you hear the hearts that beat
across the mountains, deserts, oceans
hoping for safe harbor,
an anchor
home?
Can you see small fingers gripping
other little hands
bereft of parents,
lost,
alone?
Can you hear the soft breaths
of babies
sleeping
in tired arms
weighted by
desperation,
violence, hate, war?
Can you hear the calls
in dreams
in prayer
for safe passage
for a welcome
to belong?
Can you —
how can you not —
hear,
the urgency
of hope
that hardship snuffed
and yet
still
yearns to grow?
Photo by express.co.uk
For the Daily Post
Child Refugee – Photo by UNICEF
The scent of home that she no longer has.
The spices, baking, the aromas
Of togetherness
And family
And love.
The scent of grandma,
Gone,
Killed by bombs.
The scent of ugliness
And war.
The scent of mornings
Blurred by smoke.
The scent of sea, now tainted
With the stink of gasoline
And sick
And worry.
The scent of tent
And mud
Hunger
Cold.
The scent of hope
Faint but held
In Baba’s handkerchief —
He said he’ll find them
One day
In Wherever Land.
The scent of fear
In mother’s arms
Trying to filter comfort through her own terror
Devastation. Loss.
The scent of home that she no longer has
Wafting away
In search
Of someone
Who will help
Her
Make a new one.
Photo Credit: A.M.
“How come they didn’t see it happening?”
“How could they let this happen?”
“How is it possible that it took place and no one knew?”
“How can they say they didn’t see?”
“Can people really be this blind?”
“Don’t they care?”
“Don’t they see?”
Maybe they didn’t. The improbable is possible. People can be that blind. Even when they care, they may not see.
It is easy to see what one wants, what’s congruent, what matches assumptions or views or held beliefs. It is easy to recognize what one had learned already, to follow perceptions already accepted, ways familiar … easier to understand words that resonate with what does not burden with new challenges or calls for reassessment or brings up shame.
Shame. People don’t like to see what brings up shame.
The very whiff of it can bring on denial. Projection. Deflection. Blame of others. Avoidance. Cold shoulder. Dismissal. Refusal. Minimization of the pain of others to avoid feeling one has done wrong, seen wrong, is wrong.
Shame tugs along with hate and violence, in words or action or both. Inflicting pain on others might get justified or explained away … A way to keep downtrodden what one thinks should stay unnoticed, un-make-wave-able, quiet, under rugs, buried. Unseen.
It takes time, heart, and bravery to crack and drain shame.
It is easier to blame. To point fingers. To make “an other” to scapegoat or distance from. To claim misfortune due to one’s abilities, affiliation, religion, political leanings, nationality, age, gender, race, vocation, location, possessions or lack thereof.
To yell “false claims”, “exaggeration”, “attention seeking” or the newest term: “fake news.”
Shaming is a weapon of pseudo self-preservation for those who need to ensure the pain of another remains unseen and one’s own comfort can stand unprovoked.
Shame silences:
Unspoken words of wounded children
Pleas of disrespected women
The worlds of the oppressed, belittled, turned against them.
The desperate, the lost … unanswered. Unaccepted. Unacceptable.
Unseen.
It does not need to so remain.
To face what was already there but eyes were closed to, is the first step to unmaking shame. To healing pain.
May we find ways to see. May we take heart to act. May we become for others what we need or needed them to see in us, to do for us, to hold with gentleness.
May the unseen become the visible.
May shame be drained.
For The Daily Post
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