Holy Land Poems

Since I went on the Compassionate Listening Project’s citizen delegation in November 2005, I have been writing poems about my experiences there. For me, the granddaughter of those who served in Israel’s War for Independence, the source of the Palestinian Nakba, understanding what it was I was seeing took a long time. Determining what my never again commitment (the title of my dissertation developing an anti-genocide praxis) was in light of what I saw and experienced also took a long time.

The collection begins with poems about my half-Israeli family as well as two prior visits to Israel, the first with my parents in 1986, and the second in summer 2004 when, after my second year of my doctoral program at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I decided to take a summer class in Israeli Politics, Culture, and Society at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The next section is the central journey of the listening tour of Israel and the West Bank with the Compassionate Listening Project. Several poems take place in the West Bank village of Bil’in, where we saw the impending expansion of the Modi’in Illit’s settlements and the wide swath the Separation Wall/Fence was taking up infringing on the villagers’ olive groves. Another experience was walking through the heavily-guarded inner city of Hebron where six hundred settlers who live in upper apartments throw bottles at the passers below. These settlers are protected by soldiers, who restrict Palestinians movements and shut up the inner city from traffic and customers. Our group slept overnight at a refugee camp. We went to Ramallah to listen to how a former prisoner with blood on his hands came to renounce violence and started a group with others with blood on their hands from both the Israeli and Palestinian sides that later was called Combatants for Peace. We rode the settler roads with their muraled walls, shielding from view the Palestinian towns, and spoke with a settler from Bat Ayin settlement. The section ends with another odd experience.

In the third section, I do the work of processing this overwhelming experience, some of which also included moving on into a new life with new responsibilities, more complexity. Some experiences in the West Bank were very evocative, and I came back to them in my imagination again and again. Other poems depict that processing in other kinds of ways, such as a changed perspective on old stories. The manuscript, currently called Until All of the Holy Land Rings Out, is out being read by readers and editors at presses and contests. (Please contact me if you’re interested seeing the manuscript for educational purposes.)

Holy Land Poems on the Web

“This Keening,” Minyan Magazine, Issue 10, January 2024.

“Grandma Buys Me Trees for Israel and I Imagine Their Story,” Split Rock Review, Issue 20, Spring 2023.

“Moonlit Mikveh,” Minyan Magazine, Issue 6, January 2023.

“Occupation Experiments,” Lunch Ticket, Issue 22, Winter/Spring 2023.

“A Zone of Uncertainty,” Split Rock Review, Issue 17, Fall 2021. Nominated for Best of the Net.

Three poems, “The Poet’s Wife, “Failures of Imagination,” and “Another Take on Truth or Your Story,” featured in Scoundrel Time on April 19, 2021.

“When All of the Holy Land Rings Out” is on page 14 of International Human Rights Festival Publishes, 2020.

Three poems, “The Shekhinah,” “The Key to the Cinema,” and “The Very Breath of Children Is Free of Sin,” featured in the Summer/Fall 2019 issue of Lunch Ticket

“Gush Etzion Settler Speaks” Scintilla: The Patterns of Place: Seeking Shelter; Finding Home, 2018

“The Settler’s Son Is Leaving” Scintilla: The Patterns of Place: Seeking Shelter; Finding Home, 2018

“Meting Out Justification: A Military’s Judge’s Testimony”(Blotterature: PROP!, 2018)

“On Arafat’s Yahrzeit” (HEArt Online Journal: Human Equity through Art, 2018) (Dead link) Reprinted here.

“Not Seeing the Friend of God” (Scoundrel Time, 2017)

“When God Chose Love over Truth” (Crab Orchard Review: 20 Years: Writing about 1995-2015)

“Napping in Jerusalem” (24 Pearl: The Magazine, 2013)