Blossoming Through the Fence
Even as I inhale the baby pink apricot blossoms, more abundant than we've seen before, and watch them sway lightly against the tree's spidery network of dark branches,
I exhale the sweat of Idaho lawmakers championing a bill that prohibits transgender and nonbinary children from obtaining gender-affirming care.
Even as I watch the neighbor's tall spruce, with soft green needles, reach over the fence and pet, with gentle attention, the lightly swaying branch of baby pink blossoms,
I see Idaho legislators' hands raise (It's "Christ or chaos" now, they say) in a vote that threatens parents or guardians with possible life imprisonment for traveling out of state with their child to obtain gender-affirming health care.
As I hear the wind tinkling the long chimes into intermittent music,
I hear an unexploded 1100-pound World War II bomb discovered last week in the Rhine River in the German city of Cologne.
And as I hear the unexploded World War II bomb, I hear the unexploded 1000-pound U.S./us-made, JDAM or dumb bomb lying on the main intersection of Khan Younis in southern Gaza since the Israeli military officially withdrew their forces,
and I hear the cacophony of unexploded ordinates littering streets and schools and other public spaces in Khan Younis, posing severe risks, especially for children.
And in Diesel's breathing, in his doggy sleep on the patio, I hear the broken breathing of a motherless, fatherless child in Khan Younis on the southern Gaza strip, two and a half miles east of the Mediterranean Sea.
Diesel, as I listen to you privately chewing your grain-free treat, I hear Fatima Shaheen in northern Gaza boiling khubaiza, a weed that grows in empty lots, for her family's main meal.
As you crunch your kibble, I hear Fatima Shaheen grinding up food meant for rabbits to use as flour and in your melting brown eyes, I see a child near what was the Al Shifa Hospital, now in ruins, too weak to cry, fall to the ground from starvation.
A black, black crow flies across the bright blue sky behind the network of branches, even as Matthew Gallelli crouches on the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, pulls on a pair of hearing protectors, and flips a switch on a device like
a snow making machine that begins to rumble, hiss, and shoot a fine mist of tiny aerosol particles into the air. Even as I see the crow fly east.
My fingers fiddle with a dry leaf as Matthew Gallelli's fingers fiddle with the device designed to brighten clouds, to bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, an attempt to cool the planet. I feel him anticipate success, the day when he can change the composition of the clouds.
And as I feel Matthew Gallelli's anticipation as he flips a switch, I feel alarm moving the fingers of Aarti Gupti, professor of Global Environmental Governance, as he finishes an opinion piece in which he places solar geoengineering in the category of high-risk technologies, like human cloning and chemical weapons, that need to be off-limits.
I see the intelligent and adaptable crow disappear.
I stand under the tree and photograph a close up of the pink petals, most delicate, and as I click,
I am Daniel Korona photographing Total Totality, NASA'S Astronomy Picture of the day, a series of images following the Moon's edge from beginning through the end of totality during April eighth's solar eclipse from Durango, Mexico.
In a Facebook video a little child in diapers crawls out of his bed to sleep with the dog in her doggie bed on the floor because living beings need to feel the warm breathing of another next to them. I am the baby cuddling with my dog and I am the dog and we are missing our other human.
And I am one of tens of thousands in Gaza, Israel, Sudan, Ukraine missing their human who will not be coming back from Dallas on Monday.
Under this ground on which I stand the roots of the apricot go down. And those of the holly, of the rose, the pyracantha, the autumn sage, the globe mallow. There's a gopher cage around the roots of the rose.
Even in this desert, we water the tree. Water flows from the hose, going down to the roots underground. I feel guilty. The roots of the strawberry plant keep it alive and there will be strawberries.
But what of the imperiled tree that is Gaza? Roots
in the Nakba,
the Holocaust,
the British,
the Americans,
no safe place for Jews in Europe,
forced displacement of Palestinians,
Ethnic cleaning?
INTERMISSION
What are the deeper roots?
I don't knowIdon't know I don't know
The History. It’s too much. Too much.
The roots go down,
down,
down into the earth.
Fear and hatred, occupation, rage:
weeds
that grow.
They have roots.
My teacher said pull fear out by the roots.
The Buddhist roshi says to fear hello, old friend. I know you.
Cornel West says justice is what love looks like in public.
When I speak of totality, Diesel,
I speak of you I speak of prayer
loveisallyouneedloveisallyouneed loveisallyouneed
BecauseThylovingkindnessisbetterthanlife
What is love is your/my/our heart bursting apart torn out from an unexploded bomb. On CNN an Israeli woman spoke with calm of her frail father, eighty-three. Now a hostage of Hamas, he once drove Palestinians to medical appointments. He worked for peace all his life. He lived on Nir Oz, the kibbutz he co-founded, one of the kubbutzim attacked on October 7th.
How does water
go
dripping
down,
penetrate
the dry hard ground
and make it wet and soft enough
for weeds to be gently almost imperceptibly removed,
for seeds of peace to be watered
and take root?
Even as I speak
We/I must want it
as much as we/I
want the great apricot to thrive.
About the Artist
Martha Kemper has spent her adult life as a theatre worker—actor, teacher, writer, director—till she retired from teaching at Penn State Abington College in December of 2019. Just as the pandemic hit, her and her wife Jean, along with their little dog Diesel, moved to Santa Fe. Last fall, she discovered IAIA and enrolled in Poetry Writing 1. As the course came to a close, she thought, “This is what I want to do with my life.” She enrolled in Poetry Writing 2 and has loved every day she’s spent at IAIA. She describes her teachers as having been extraordinary in opening doors to new worlds of poetry and in attending with great care and creativity to students and their writing. She says, “My fellow IAIA students are continually inspiring, challenging, soul-stirring, and brave.” Martha is 70 years old, European-American, and a non-degree seeking student. She wishes to keep writing poems and describes being published in this year’s anthology as a profound honor. She says, “My life has been deeply blessed by IAIA and the people I’ve had the privilege to study with and learn from. Poetry is now a path I am walking.”