by Mary Lou Kownack

I begin each day by reading a poem or two. It's a very Benedictine practice. "Listen with the ear of your heart," is the first line of the Rule of Saint Benedict. "Listen" is what every poem whispers. Listen to people whose voices speak of loss, of love, of joy, of dreams deferred, and find in them an echo of me and you. Find in them the one human heart.

The poet Joan Murray notes that, following a tragedy, the constant blabber of politicians and news commentators can leave us numb and powerless. "But poems," she writes, "can cut through the confusion... and stir us from within."

To meet the horror of the Middle East slaughter, I picked up This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. I paid special attention to the Palestinian and Israeli poets represented in the book. "Behind Bars" is poignant poem told from the viewpoint of a Palestinian youth in prison imagining his mother at home.

 

I see her...
My satchel there on the bookshelf and my school uniform
     on the hanger
I see her hand reaching out brushing the dust from it I follow my mother's steps and
     listen to her thoughts
yearning for her arms and the face of day.

- Fadwa Tuqan (trans. Hatem Hussaini)

 

Suddenly a Palestinian "terrorist" gets a human face. He goes to school. Just like I did. He wears a school uniform. Just like I did. He has a mother who shows her love by tenderly taking care of his clothes. Just like mine did. He loves his mother and misses his mother. Just like me.
This poem by an Israeli poet should be the first item on the agenda of any peace negotiations.

 

Jerusalem

On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy, the towel of a man who is my enemy, to wipe off the sweat of his brow.

In the sky of the Old City
a kite.
At the other end of the string,
a child
I can't see
because of the wall.

We have put up many flags, they have put up many flags.
To make us think that they're happy
To make them think that we're happy.

- Yehuda Amichai (trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

 

Poetry is not the solution to a peaceful world, but it is a beginning of one. "Listen," Benedict said, because he believed that's how community begins. In her afterword Nye writes, "I hope the poets of This Same Sky feel like a family to you - full of odd cousins, comforting sisters, hopeful brothers. How can we ever be lonely in this wide family of voices out there? And don't ever believe what anyone told you about not talking to strangers. Talking and listening to 'strangers' may be the most important thing you do in your life."

 

Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, is a Benedictine nun, writer, and poet living in Erie, Pennsylvania.