peace – Writers Resist

God in Hiding

By Kayla Blau

Our five-year-old fingers plucked mancala beads,
wove white flower crowns,
blew dandelion seed wishes.
Our Barbies knew no god.
Our families spoke nothing of politics.
Sleepovers at hers were cardamom and allspice,
steaming lamb nestled under mounds of rice, fried eggplant, labneh and cucumber.
Sleepovers at mine, sustained by cardboard box macaroni and cheese,
spoons slick with I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.
In middle school, her AIM screen name read jordanianprincess91.
Later, she told me her parents fibbed, spun stories of Jordanian roots
rather than risk the reclamation of “Palestinian” in our majority-white suburb.
My ancestors hid the same, cut the “stein” from our last name,
the trade-offs the hunted make for survival, for safety.
Later still, ICE agents forced Leila’s parents’ hand,
plucked her family from U.S suburbia back to East Jerusalem.
When I visited her,
Holy Land revealed
metal cages, Jews-only streets,
protestors spouting “Death to Arabs” in the same language my ancestors prayed in.
What of apartheid is holy?
What god reigns here?

Kayla Blau (she/her) is a queer writer and facilitator based in Seattle, WA. Her work can be found in The Seventh Wave, The Stranger, Crosscut, and South Seattle Emerald, among others. Her poetry and personal essays are included in anthologies such as Emerald Reflections, Writing for Peace: Resistance Issue, and Wanderlust. More of her work can be found at www.keepgoing.press.

Photo credit: Kashfi Halford via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

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Two Poems by Victoria Barnes

A Cosmic Dirty Story

—from the New York Times, 9 August 1945

From an open door in the sky,

the threshold of a new industrial art.

To the earth, an explosion of red:

the new and terrifying weapon.

In the morning newspaper, images arrive:

an imagination-sweeping experiment.

As we read the story, we learn—

The great bomb … harnesses the power of the universe to destroy the enemy by concussion, blast and fire.

With the fire, we consider our victory:

eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frankenstein’s monster of the world.

In the glory of it all, the flash was pure—

an element of elation in the realization that we had perfected this devastating weapon.

Yet in our blindness an ocean apart, we see no blood.

What has been done … is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

In reading more, we smell no cinders.

Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death.

In listening for imagined voices, we hear no calls.

We are more prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely.

In turning away, we relish no victory.

The cruel sight resulting from the attack is so impressive that one cannot distinguish between men and women killed by the fire. The corpses were too numerous to be counted.

In knowing now, we reject our place:

What is this terrible new weapon, which the War Department also calls the ‘Cosmic Bomb’?

Coda:

In knowing now, we reject our place:

How will these righteous-thinking American people feel about the way their war leaders are perpetuating this crime against man and God?

Liberty Island

Give me your cliff
your cloud
your dreamy vision
of birds and fog
and flying

in the whir and whirl

of industry and asphalt
and commuters
in sooty rain—

of mothers and babies
and withered neglect
in malaise maligned—

with searing tears
I lift my lamp
but shut
the golden door.

Victoria Barnes has studied mythology, creative nonfiction, poetry, bookbinding, metaphoric thinking, and a bunch of other seemingly unrelated mishmash. She did not take math past high school, an accomplishment given her too many college degrees. She endeavors in taking photos and writing poetry. Currently she is writing a cycle of poems imagining Amelia Earhart’s thoughts on each airborne leg of her last flight and studying the skies in her travels, especially in the Southwest U.S.

Photo credit: Daniel Horacio Agostini via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.