Thank you, Padraig. Your interpretations and your generous sharing of your heart are such important nourishment for me.
I simply catch on the line: “what need have you to dread” — and that shapes my whole response to the poem. I’m sorry to say that I find so much to dread in the world, from the true atrocities you describe that threaten the lives of so many, to the mundane Sunday evening fears of the coming work week and the lonely self-doubt that accompanies it. I’m not equating those two things, certainly, but merely demonstrating that the sensation is irrational and can occupy any space regardless of circumstance.
The poem makes me want to be in conversation and communion with the child on the shore that lives in me and within each of us — to remember some uninhibited joy to be expressed freely, in response to and defiance of life’s hardness. I know it’s possible.
Thanks for the invitation to this poem. I’m wishing you and everyone a beautiful Sunday wherever you may be.
Before the pandemic years, this poem was about my son. Then, of course, the world got its hands on him. Without me reassuring him that he was safe (because, how can I?), his dancing grew more cautious. He's learned to check the weather on his tablet before he steps outside.
Today, this poem is about Betty. Regardless of starving children, school lockdowns, and strangling binaries, my dog still does figure eights around the palm trees in the backyard. Her body is still lawless and clumsy and deliciously free. Every day, I envy her.
The word “and” at the beginning of the fourth line prompts me to ask’ “What ideas are you joining little conjunction?” Dance there and tumble down your hair. Dance and tumble. Life.
May there be peaceful nourishment in this tumbled world of ours. Thanks to all of you and Padraig for nourishing my soul.
I tasted salt on my lips when reading the “salt drops.” And I saw my good friend’s daughter, dancing at such an age of innocence and inhibition.
And also feeling wistful about the hard lessons of life ahead for her, and that she can keep dancing, even in the hard times. Alice Walker wrote a book titled, “Hard Times Require Furious Dancing,” and I think of that title to recall the importance of music and art and poetry to help us find beauty in even and especially dire times.
…
Mosab Abu Toha’s essay about finding food in Gaza is more than enough to break your heart, thinking about the lack of food’s impact on the soon-to-be born, the children, the CHILDREN, without enough food.
This poem reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'Spring and Fall' where the innocence of a child is set against the shadows of coming adulthood. Perhaps all poets have written about this at some time or another.
I see a pervasive righteousness in many social media posts on Gaza - that it is somehow sinful to turn away or remain ignorant of their suffering, even for a moment. I understand the passion, but feel paradoxically that we must also connect daily with the innocent joy of the present moment that a child (including the child in us) feels and demonstrates. That this is also necessary to remain compassionate and human. There's a poignancy in that 'double-seeing' that the narrator in both these poems feels. These poems addressed to children are really about adulthood and the loss of pure joy without implications.
…my 6 month old grand daughter…born by the sea, where the land laughs with the surf. Under the stars…. always look up. Listening to the winds. Unconcerned about Life unfolding.
Reading the first line, "Dance there upon the shore;" I hear a response:
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but I want to dance with my mama and papa, and my sister, my friend Refaat from school, and his sister Heba, but they were martyred. I have no one to dance with now.
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but I don’t have legs anymore. The bombs took them. The doctors tried to help. I don’t have my legs anymore. But Uncle Yeats, can you tell me, will they grow back?
I want to dance on the beach, Uncle Yeats, but I am scared. Will Israeli airstrikes come to get me, like they killed those 9 kids watching the Argentina vs Netherlands match, the World Cup, at the Fun Time Beach Cafe in Khan Younis the year I was born (I’m 10), or the 4 boys killed by Israeli naval fire while playing on the beach?
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but all I can hear are the drones, they do not stop, they never stop. When I am martyred, will the drones stop?
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but my body hurts. I am hungry. I am thirsty. I threw up all night after drinking water. It was dirty. My dad and cousin went out to get flour to the other day, but they never came home. I want them to come home. My mom keeps crying. I am telling her we will be martyrs too, so we can all be together again.
~
As I read this opening line, I think of how dance can be carefree and playful, and how dance is also catharsis … how we need this, even in the face of annihilation, of erasure. I think of Frantz Fanon’s words about dance… "the circle of dance is a permissive circle." And I think of the men, women, and children dancing the Dabke in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn yesterday, despite another missile strike on a hospital in Gaza, despite insults on top of injuries, despite gaslighting, despite hunger, despite .....
As I read this poem again and again and again, and try to not only think of the images, words, sounds of the children in Gaza, I think of my niece, who, at 7 years old after a trip to the beach in the winter, and boldly taking off her shoes and getting wet she sang out, in an intoxicated-like state, “I am drenched, but I am happy!!!” How at nearly 12, I wonder how things have changed....
As I read this poem, I also think of the incredible attempts by adults in Gaza to bring joy to the children, despite living in unfathomable conditions, and under the constant threat of death from Israeli fire, hunger, illness. I am thinking of Amir Al-Gharabawi, a young Palestinian man in Gaza who does parkour, the acrobatic-like sport, who has been bringing smiles to the faces of children by performing parkour in all the places he himself has been displaced to, currently in Rafah. I think of the Free Gaza Circus that’s been performing on the sand, amidst the tents to bring joy, laughter, some moments of relief, some moments of hope to the children. I think of the beautiful artist, a young man, Mohammed Sami Qariqa, who had been living in London but was volunteering in Gaza, and on October 16th shared a video on his social media from a hospital where people were sheltering, creating activities for the children to bring levity and joy, seeing smiling laughing children. He said in his post, ‘I tried to alleviate their fear and panic …. I will never forget the look and sounds of their laughs at this moment.” The hospital was bombed soon thereafter, and Mohammed Sami was killed, along with the children he was trying to make smile.
“The monstrous crying of the wind” — I hear cries, the sobs of the young girl Shazaa whose father was killed in an Israeli airstrike, who was struggling to accept that her dad was no more. She sobs and sobs and pleads, wanting her father to come back, “I would clean the house for you. And cause you no trouble.” I hear the anguished cries of a mother whose children were killed. I hear the sounds of agony from those who in a blink of the eye have lost their beloveds. I feel the endless ocean of tears inside of me for the fact of living in a world where I hear Christopher Lockyear, Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders speaking of the children in Gaza telling us, “psychological injuries have led children as young as 5 to tell us that the would prefer to die.”
And as I read this poem by Yeats, I think of another. This one by Khaled Juma, a Palestinian poet:
“The monstrous crying of the wind!” This past Wednesday evening we had a roaring wind that sounded very threatening. Alas, all power went out. No heat(on a very chilly night), no lights, no running water, no flushing toilet, no working refrigerator. Thursday morning was very chilly. This outage continued into the evening. Friday morning I found myself very very grateful for all that electrical power restored.
So, today when I read this poem, I think it is not the wind that is monstrous. We are being warned about all we humans have created that buffers us from Nature. Maybe, of course, many of these “benefits” are supportive of “modern” living, BUT, at what price? These forces of Nature are significant. And, they are messengers of life. We listen, and choose not to hear, way to Often.
Reading of Yeats and memorizing poems, I was thinking of his Lake Isle of Innisfree (“and I shall have some peace there”) as I began reading the lines of the poem you brought to the newsletter, feeling its cadences. I had an image of a water hose fight between my curly headed toddler grandson and late husband. And then the list of the observer’s cares.
Your annotations (BOOM) in addition to indicating stops, struck me as echoes of bombardment in the context of Gaza as I read that portion of the newsletter. And yes, I too feel a gnawing awareness of the real issue of food shortage in the war zone, Gaza.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree) is like an answering poem — a lake, not a shore; useful labor of building, gardening, beekeeping; the softer sounds of crickets, bees. A refuge I would wish for every child. But not reality now or likely decades
I too think of the Gazan children and the terrible toll of death rained on an already stricken population. I have seen videos of children dancing there in spite of it all. I also think of the many Chasids in the 1940s who were forced to dance on the streets for the Nazis at the same time sticks and rods rained down on them and their store windows, breaking flesh and glass. I think of "Dance Me to the End of Love" by Leonard Cohen which is about a couple dancing right outside their gas chamber. I think of my 11 year old grandmother lost in the woods with her poor family fleeing persecution for being Jewish then missing the Titanic, finding passage on the Franconia one month later, winning dance marathon trophies here in the US in the 1920s which my cousin possesses in her sleek home in Georgia. I think of Sudan and the endless centuries long parade of murder and fleeing and exile and all those over the world dancing outside their refugee tents. The winds change, the dances change and I think of The World According to Garp, how "we are all terminal cases". While we can never break Nature's cycle of Life and Death, we must learn to break the cycles of War and Peace and somehow transform it to models of Conflict and Tenderness because War and Ravage are the unnecessary evil twins of and consequences for our foul irresponsibilities. That it takes the twin tool uses of Bravery and Humility of which we have long been in short supply when we have needed them most.
And that is why we Jews say as a congregation each and every time after completing the reading of each book of the Hebrew Bible, "May we go from Strength to Strength" because we don't..... none of us do enough of and value what Strength means at its core well beyond the unfortunate and too often unavoidable military response....Jew, Christian, Gazan, Muslim, Hindu you name it. It means the opposite of bullying and grabbed power and most of all vengeance. Let it be a reminder for each of us because it's already too late for too many and for some of our aching ravaged planet. The power to heal and dance is stronger than Death....if we allow it to be so.
Thank you Padraig for today's share and amazing poem.
I think of my son and daughter with these lines and all of the kids their age who are slowly learning about the work their grandparents did to make the life around them, and all that they could not accomplish. A human life is so short and to live it fully we all must make decisions about where we put our care.
Could the adults have stopped the war if they turned away from their children on more occasions? Could grandfather have become rich if he’d hardened his heart and refused to serve those in need? Perhaps. But in those case and so many others the ancestors would not have been able to raise up the children they did, even with all of the mistakes, to lives of hope and charity. There will always be more work than we can do, in a lifetime. But what we do while we live should give the children the time to be a child where their only care should be the beauty of living.
I love that the setting is the seashore. It feels like the one fixture that the transitory child & watching adult can rely on. No matter what changes from here, the tides will still turn.
Hello Pádraig and fellow sojourners. Pádraig, first, thank you for today's important poetry-reading lesson.
Second, your words are painfully relevant today:
"An older man, who has been concerned with the question of a country’s independence from empire, is feeling the weight of years — and impending war — upon his shoulders, not to mention the crisis of seeing fools triumph, gains lost as soon as they’re won, good people dying, and traitors rising."
As to "I’m curious what you see in the poem, as you read it today":
I see my carefree, innocent early years that could not imagine the turmoil of exile and life thereafter.
I wonder how my grandchildren will traverse life and its challenges.
The image that you provided from Annisa Hale suggests that life is a continuum of "tos and fros". Powerful forces drive us and we are tumbled by and on the surf towards unknown shores and the respite is in that instant when the water stops driving us and begins to recede.
Thank you, Padraig. Your interpretations and your generous sharing of your heart are such important nourishment for me.
I simply catch on the line: “what need have you to dread” — and that shapes my whole response to the poem. I’m sorry to say that I find so much to dread in the world, from the true atrocities you describe that threaten the lives of so many, to the mundane Sunday evening fears of the coming work week and the lonely self-doubt that accompanies it. I’m not equating those two things, certainly, but merely demonstrating that the sensation is irrational and can occupy any space regardless of circumstance.
The poem makes me want to be in conversation and communion with the child on the shore that lives in me and within each of us — to remember some uninhibited joy to be expressed freely, in response to and defiance of life’s hardness. I know it’s possible.
Thanks for the invitation to this poem. I’m wishing you and everyone a beautiful Sunday wherever you may be.
Before the pandemic years, this poem was about my son. Then, of course, the world got its hands on him. Without me reassuring him that he was safe (because, how can I?), his dancing grew more cautious. He's learned to check the weather on his tablet before he steps outside.
Today, this poem is about Betty. Regardless of starving children, school lockdowns, and strangling binaries, my dog still does figure eights around the palm trees in the backyard. Her body is still lawless and clumsy and deliciously free. Every day, I envy her.
Hi Friends in Poetry,
The word “and” at the beginning of the fourth line prompts me to ask’ “What ideas are you joining little conjunction?” Dance there and tumble down your hair. Dance and tumble. Life.
May there be peaceful nourishment in this tumbled world of ours. Thanks to all of you and Padraig for nourishing my soul.
Greetings, all.
I tasted salt on my lips when reading the “salt drops.” And I saw my good friend’s daughter, dancing at such an age of innocence and inhibition.
And also feeling wistful about the hard lessons of life ahead for her, and that she can keep dancing, even in the hard times. Alice Walker wrote a book titled, “Hard Times Require Furious Dancing,” and I think of that title to recall the importance of music and art and poetry to help us find beauty in even and especially dire times.
…
Mosab Abu Toha’s essay about finding food in Gaza is more than enough to break your heart, thinking about the lack of food’s impact on the soon-to-be born, the children, the CHILDREN, without enough food.
This poem reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'Spring and Fall' where the innocence of a child is set against the shadows of coming adulthood. Perhaps all poets have written about this at some time or another.
I see a pervasive righteousness in many social media posts on Gaza - that it is somehow sinful to turn away or remain ignorant of their suffering, even for a moment. I understand the passion, but feel paradoxically that we must also connect daily with the innocent joy of the present moment that a child (including the child in us) feels and demonstrates. That this is also necessary to remain compassionate and human. There's a poignancy in that 'double-seeing' that the narrator in both these poems feels. These poems addressed to children are really about adulthood and the loss of pure joy without implications.
…my 6 month old grand daughter…born by the sea, where the land laughs with the surf. Under the stars…. always look up. Listening to the winds. Unconcerned about Life unfolding.
This is quoted from:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_seeing_beauty_matters_even_in_the_midst_of_war#thank-influence)
“Beautifying is a way to exert agency, grieve, and heal.
…as children participated in efforts to beautify their home, it seemed to positively influence their own coping mechanisms and well-being.
Creating, witnessing, and experiencing beauty offers a connection to the familiar, works to preserve cultural identity, and fosters belonging.”
(I wrote this for another Substacker...The Raft’s Waging Peace)
Bombs go off during
Birthday parties
Artist paint murals and
arrange intricate mosaics on
remnant building walls
Plants are potted,
floors are swept, and
chairs are set up on
makeshift porches
Muddy roads become
venues for celebrations and
soccer fields for kids
Humans are wired for
connection
belonging and
beauty
“The monstrous crying of the wind!” We bear the unbearable by dancing upon the shore. Holy innocence, indeed.
Thank you, Pádraig. And safe travels!
Reading the first line, "Dance there upon the shore;" I hear a response:
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but I want to dance with my mama and papa, and my sister, my friend Refaat from school, and his sister Heba, but they were martyred. I have no one to dance with now.
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but I don’t have legs anymore. The bombs took them. The doctors tried to help. I don’t have my legs anymore. But Uncle Yeats, can you tell me, will they grow back?
I want to dance on the beach, Uncle Yeats, but I am scared. Will Israeli airstrikes come to get me, like they killed those 9 kids watching the Argentina vs Netherlands match, the World Cup, at the Fun Time Beach Cafe in Khan Younis the year I was born (I’m 10), or the 4 boys killed by Israeli naval fire while playing on the beach?
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but all I can hear are the drones, they do not stop, they never stop. When I am martyred, will the drones stop?
I want to, Uncle Yeats, but my body hurts. I am hungry. I am thirsty. I threw up all night after drinking water. It was dirty. My dad and cousin went out to get flour to the other day, but they never came home. I want them to come home. My mom keeps crying. I am telling her we will be martyrs too, so we can all be together again.
~
As I read this opening line, I think of how dance can be carefree and playful, and how dance is also catharsis … how we need this, even in the face of annihilation, of erasure. I think of Frantz Fanon’s words about dance… "the circle of dance is a permissive circle." And I think of the men, women, and children dancing the Dabke in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn yesterday, despite another missile strike on a hospital in Gaza, despite insults on top of injuries, despite gaslighting, despite hunger, despite .....
As I read this poem again and again and again, and try to not only think of the images, words, sounds of the children in Gaza, I think of my niece, who, at 7 years old after a trip to the beach in the winter, and boldly taking off her shoes and getting wet she sang out, in an intoxicated-like state, “I am drenched, but I am happy!!!” How at nearly 12, I wonder how things have changed....
As I read this poem, I also think of the incredible attempts by adults in Gaza to bring joy to the children, despite living in unfathomable conditions, and under the constant threat of death from Israeli fire, hunger, illness. I am thinking of Amir Al-Gharabawi, a young Palestinian man in Gaza who does parkour, the acrobatic-like sport, who has been bringing smiles to the faces of children by performing parkour in all the places he himself has been displaced to, currently in Rafah. I think of the Free Gaza Circus that’s been performing on the sand, amidst the tents to bring joy, laughter, some moments of relief, some moments of hope to the children. I think of the beautiful artist, a young man, Mohammed Sami Qariqa, who had been living in London but was volunteering in Gaza, and on October 16th shared a video on his social media from a hospital where people were sheltering, creating activities for the children to bring levity and joy, seeing smiling laughing children. He said in his post, ‘I tried to alleviate their fear and panic …. I will never forget the look and sounds of their laughs at this moment.” The hospital was bombed soon thereafter, and Mohammed Sami was killed, along with the children he was trying to make smile.
“The monstrous crying of the wind” — I hear cries, the sobs of the young girl Shazaa whose father was killed in an Israeli airstrike, who was struggling to accept that her dad was no more. She sobs and sobs and pleads, wanting her father to come back, “I would clean the house for you. And cause you no trouble.” I hear the anguished cries of a mother whose children were killed. I hear the sounds of agony from those who in a blink of the eye have lost their beloveds. I feel the endless ocean of tears inside of me for the fact of living in a world where I hear Christopher Lockyear, Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders speaking of the children in Gaza telling us, “psychological injuries have led children as young as 5 to tell us that the would prefer to die.”
And as I read this poem by Yeats, I think of another. This one by Khaled Juma, a Palestinian poet:
Oh rascal children of Gaza.
You who constantly disturbed me
with your screams under my window.
You who filled every morning
with rush and chaos.
You who broke my vase
and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back,
and scream as you want
and break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers.
Come back,
Just come back..
“The monstrous crying of the wind!” This past Wednesday evening we had a roaring wind that sounded very threatening. Alas, all power went out. No heat(on a very chilly night), no lights, no running water, no flushing toilet, no working refrigerator. Thursday morning was very chilly. This outage continued into the evening. Friday morning I found myself very very grateful for all that electrical power restored.
So, today when I read this poem, I think it is not the wind that is monstrous. We are being warned about all we humans have created that buffers us from Nature. Maybe, of course, many of these “benefits” are supportive of “modern” living, BUT, at what price? These forces of Nature are significant. And, they are messengers of life. We listen, and choose not to hear, way to Often.
Ryokan has a poem:
As I watch the children happily playing
Without realizing it,
My eyes fill with tears.
Reading of Yeats and memorizing poems, I was thinking of his Lake Isle of Innisfree (“and I shall have some peace there”) as I began reading the lines of the poem you brought to the newsletter, feeling its cadences. I had an image of a water hose fight between my curly headed toddler grandson and late husband. And then the list of the observer’s cares.
Your annotations (BOOM) in addition to indicating stops, struck me as echoes of bombardment in the context of Gaza as I read that portion of the newsletter. And yes, I too feel a gnawing awareness of the real issue of food shortage in the war zone, Gaza.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree) is like an answering poem — a lake, not a shore; useful labor of building, gardening, beekeeping; the softer sounds of crickets, bees. A refuge I would wish for every child. But not reality now or likely decades
I too think of the Gazan children and the terrible toll of death rained on an already stricken population. I have seen videos of children dancing there in spite of it all. I also think of the many Chasids in the 1940s who were forced to dance on the streets for the Nazis at the same time sticks and rods rained down on them and their store windows, breaking flesh and glass. I think of "Dance Me to the End of Love" by Leonard Cohen which is about a couple dancing right outside their gas chamber. I think of my 11 year old grandmother lost in the woods with her poor family fleeing persecution for being Jewish then missing the Titanic, finding passage on the Franconia one month later, winning dance marathon trophies here in the US in the 1920s which my cousin possesses in her sleek home in Georgia. I think of Sudan and the endless centuries long parade of murder and fleeing and exile and all those over the world dancing outside their refugee tents. The winds change, the dances change and I think of The World According to Garp, how "we are all terminal cases". While we can never break Nature's cycle of Life and Death, we must learn to break the cycles of War and Peace and somehow transform it to models of Conflict and Tenderness because War and Ravage are the unnecessary evil twins of and consequences for our foul irresponsibilities. That it takes the twin tool uses of Bravery and Humility of which we have long been in short supply when we have needed them most.
And that is why we Jews say as a congregation each and every time after completing the reading of each book of the Hebrew Bible, "May we go from Strength to Strength" because we don't..... none of us do enough of and value what Strength means at its core well beyond the unfortunate and too often unavoidable military response....Jew, Christian, Gazan, Muslim, Hindu you name it. It means the opposite of bullying and grabbed power and most of all vengeance. Let it be a reminder for each of us because it's already too late for too many and for some of our aching ravaged planet. The power to heal and dance is stronger than Death....if we allow it to be so.
Thank you Padraig for today's share and amazing poem.
“Being young you have not known/
Nor the best labourer dead/
And all the sheaves to bind.”
I think of my son and daughter with these lines and all of the kids their age who are slowly learning about the work their grandparents did to make the life around them, and all that they could not accomplish. A human life is so short and to live it fully we all must make decisions about where we put our care.
Could the adults have stopped the war if they turned away from their children on more occasions? Could grandfather have become rich if he’d hardened his heart and refused to serve those in need? Perhaps. But in those case and so many others the ancestors would not have been able to raise up the children they did, even with all of the mistakes, to lives of hope and charity. There will always be more work than we can do, in a lifetime. But what we do while we live should give the children the time to be a child where their only care should be the beauty of living.
Thank you for this beautiful post today, with so much that is affecting and deeply thought provoking.
I love this:
“A poem locates you in the point-of-view of the original writer but also reaches through time — to whenever now is — alive again on our breaths. “
I love that the setting is the seashore. It feels like the one fixture that the transitory child & watching adult can rely on. No matter what changes from here, the tides will still turn.
Hello Pádraig and fellow sojourners. Pádraig, first, thank you for today's important poetry-reading lesson.
Second, your words are painfully relevant today:
"An older man, who has been concerned with the question of a country’s independence from empire, is feeling the weight of years — and impending war — upon his shoulders, not to mention the crisis of seeing fools triumph, gains lost as soon as they’re won, good people dying, and traitors rising."
As to "I’m curious what you see in the poem, as you read it today":
I see my carefree, innocent early years that could not imagine the turmoil of exile and life thereafter.
I wonder how my grandchildren will traverse life and its challenges.
The image that you provided from Annisa Hale suggests that life is a continuum of "tos and fros". Powerful forces drive us and we are tumbled by and on the surf towards unknown shores and the respite is in that instant when the water stops driving us and begins to recede.
Happy Sunday to all.