Summary: Three poems reflecting on Gaza, Judaism and Rosa Luxemburg – Editors
Rosa Luxemburg
Variations on a theme of (Robert) Hayden
If somehow, against all odds, humanity
survives, if we surmount the warming, wars,
fascist revivals, and nuclear meltdowns marching upon us,
if somehow the miracle of world revolution arises, somehow endures,
then the world we invent, our new insitutions, our new morals
will stem, perhaps unknowingly, from this Luxemburg,
this Red Rosa, this apostle of mass strikes as arousers of billions,
this annalist of imperial slaughters in Southern Africa and far beyond,
this chronicler of capital destroying villages‘ solidarities and communion,
this woman of twisted body, murdered by so-called Social Democratic comrades
as a Pole, as a Jew, as a dissenter who understood dispute and negativity as the keys
to community and solidarity,
indeed, saw that disagreement may feel like shit
but is the only manure for creative growth.
From every river to every sea
A land
with
a people
coveted
by another.
A horn blows.
Hospital walls come
tumbling down.
Children and adults,
if lucky, flee.
Elderly people,
people just like me,
watch in fear.
Gaza?
West Bank?
Ukraine?
Rojava?
Every people
must be free.
Jim Crow Judaism
There was no hypocrisy
in their Jim Crow Judaism
when my aunt and uncle
despised both their dime store’s
black clientele
and my civil rights activism,
nor any hesitation
to use the racist slurs
of D.C. in the ‘50s,
“blackie,” “schvartzes,” and “colored”
since the “n-word” was too
“lower class” in the circles
they lived in.
Nor were they slow to support a
zero-guilt Zionism
of ardent endorsement
for Israeli land-grabs,
and a disdain for shiksas like Judy
a woman unknown to them, who,
they assured me,
would later call me “Jew”—thus also ensuring
that they were neither invited to our wedding
nor ever met our daughter
to call her shiksa too.
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