February 2024
Author's Note: Two poems this month from two wholly different realms of experience, two contrasting states of mind. I wrote the poem about Gaza two months ago. As of this morning they're still bombing.
Gifts
Two deer in the saltmarsh park
A gift of the season
in the season of giving
So beautiful, so perfect: still as statues,
such idols of themselves
Two does, clean as wind,
young, but independent,
my spirit animal
Heads lifted,
gazing at me so strongly
(as though they would know of me some secret truth)
from barely twenty feet away
(as if to say, ‘what would you have of us?’)
No sign of fear, or apprehension,
they watch me,
as if in anticipation,
as if they would have something of me
I search my pockets, find nothing to offer
Two deer: two gifts,
well met in a hidden place,
messengers, envoys with
nothing to give, nothing to say, on either side
They wait, I wait, each returning the other’s gaze
I cannot reason why
but the strange perfection of the moment holds me
Can they find in me a cause of such curiosity
as I find in them?
They return my gaze, never looking off,
as if with a pleased wonder matching mine for them
Miles from any habitat that can sustain creatures
who must browse the earth,
and within a place surrounded by machines routinely driven
at killing speed…
what drew them?
Do they come in search of wonders,
something to sustain the appetites of the spirit,
as their presence has nourished my own?
Needful Killing
There are always so many good reasons,
it appears, for killing people.
The atrocities, for example, committed by French troops attempting
to quell the uprising of enslaved Haitians
justified the new country’s massacre of French-speaking Creoles in 1804.
And after all, they reasoned, “Whites” were not “truly human.”
Given that some Armenians were “colluding” with the Russians,
their fellow Christians, a Turkish official explained in justification
for massacres Turkish forces committed during World War I,
his country was forced to act.
“We have been blamed for not making a distinction between guilty
and innocent Armenians,” he acknowledged. “But to do so was impossible.”
“Who remembers the Armenians today?” Hitler asked, in 1939.
But it was the United States, Nazi officials explained,
that provided the best precedent for genocide:
Clearing away a continent’s Indigenous inhabitants to open a country
in which new ‘American’ settlers could plant their prosperous roots,
they observed,
has yielded the world’s most dynamic economy.
Other apologists offered further rationales, justifying the mass murders
of Jews, Romani, and Communists as “anticipatory self-defense
against a mortal threat.”
The killing of children was needful as well, voices of the Third Reich explained,
because when they learned how their parents had died,
they would grow up hating Germany.
Perhaps such reasoning explains the paucity of Israeli voices
objecting to the carpet bombing of Gaza.
For if there are no Palestinian children left alive in Gaza
when Hamas has at last been “totally” destroyed,
no one will remain
to pose a ‘mortal threat’ to Israel.
An ‘eye for an eye,’ Gandhi pointed out, makes the whole world blind.
This time it appears that Netanyahu’s genocidal war is not stopping with the eyes.
©2024 Robert Knox
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