‘I Didn’t Believe I Would Ever Learn to Die’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
My heart is heavier than it ever has been. I’m keeping it as open as I can to the deepening spiral of hate and fear that drives US politics. The urge to look away, to shut down, is ever present. I’ve found that poetry, and its ability to tell stories beyond headlines, is a deep path to empathy. Poetry gives a shape to the anger, the bodies, the crush of memory and history.
These two poems from Asmaa Azaizeh (translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Haj) at Asymptote Journal have stayed with me for days. They speak of violence and how it lingers in blood, in lullabies, in generation after generation. They speak of the harrowing process of self-identification in the face of war and displacement. “My heart grows in the well like a pomegranate tree, each time a branch is / broken I climb another on my way to you. All of me breaks, so I become a nest.” History doesn’t leave us; it’s our soil, our air, our words, our skin. To resist the present is to know where it came from, where we came from, where we could go.