Opinion by Norman Solomon (san francisco, usa)Friday, November 17, 2023Inter Press Service
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Nov 17 (IPS) – Two centuries in the past, Percy Shelley wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” But elite energy has routinely vetoed their greatest measures. Nonetheless, the power of poetry to encourage and nurture is treasured, together with when governments are on protracted killing sprees.
In Gaza, greater than 11,000 civilians have been killed since early October. Youngsters are perishing at a mean charge of 10 deaths per hour. The continuing slaughter by Israeli forces — supported by big army help from the USA — follows Hamas’s atrocities on Oct. 7 in Israel, the place the most recent estimate of the dying toll is 1,200 together with at the least 846 civilians along with some 200 hostages.
However numbers don’t get us very far in human phrases. And information accounts have restricted capacities to attach with actual feelings.
That’s the place poetry can go far past the place journalism fails. A couple of phrases from a poet may chip away on the frozen blocks that help illegitimate energy. And we’d acquire energy from the readability that just a few traces can carry.
Stanley Kunitz wrote:
In a murderous timethe coronary heart breaks and breaksand lives by breaking.It’s essential to gothrough darkish and deeper darkand to not flip.
“In a darkish time,” Theodore Roethke wrote, “the attention begins to see.”
Bob Dylan wrote traces that might now be heard as addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Biden:
You fasten all of the triggersFor the others to fireThen you sit again and watchWhen the dying rely will get higherYou conceal in your mansionWhile the younger folks’s bloodFlows out of their bodiesAnd is buried within the mud
June Jordan wrote:
I used to be born a Black womanand nowI am develop into a Palestinianagainst the relentless laughter of evilthere is much less and fewer dwelling roomand the place are my family members?
In the USA, far-off from the carnage, viewers and listeners and readers can simply favor to not really see that “their” authorities helps Israel to maintain killing 1000’s upon 1000’s of Palestinian kids and different civilians. “I name it merciless and possibly the foundation of all cruelty / to know what happens however not acknowledge the very fact,” a poem by William Stafford says.
From Pink Floyd:
Don’t settle for that what’s happeningIs only a case of others’ sufferingOr you’ll discover that you just’re becoming a member of inThe turning away. . . .Only a world that all of us should shareIt’s not sufficient simply to face and stareIs it solely a dream that there’ll beNo extra turning away?
Franz Kafka wrote: “You may maintain your self again from the sufferings of the world, that’s one thing you might be free to do and it accords together with your nature, however maybe this very holding again is the one struggling you possibly can keep away from.”
Norman Solomon is nationwide director of RootsAction.org and govt director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He’s the creator of many books together with Battle Made Straightforward. His newest ebook, Battle Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Army Machine, was revealed in summer time 2023 by The New Press.
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