“please don’t give up on me / and my eyes are wide awake / for my battle symphony”

[larryhammer]

Poetry Monday:


Found in Translation, David Connors

In these days of frantic war, she offers her skills
to do something, anything, however anodyne.
She translates the names of Palestinian dead
from Arabic into Hebrew, scouring websites
for the Gaza fallen. This Israeli woman
carries out her tedious task, oblivious,
detached from realities of this Arab street.
She gets the job done, robotically listing names,
hoping to make them seem more human to people
who may have become blind to their humanity,
and comprehends little of the sheer scale of it
until noticing all the children she’s listed
and how generations of the same family
can be wiped out of history so effortlessly.


---L.

Subject quote from Battle Symphony, Linkin Park.

Comments

[sovay]

until noticing all the children she’s listed
and how generations of the same family
can be wiped out of history so effortlessly.

That lands.

[larryhammer]

Yup. Nailed it without a bobble.

[shewhomust]

This chimes for me with Britain's many village war memorials, on which the same names repeat (and that's just in WWI).

[larryhammer]

That makes a lot of sense.