State of Mind
I am not in Gaza
under any bombardment,
or occupied by forces I am conscious of;
in the bunker of my mind
I hold off trivial foes,
wave upon wave of anxiety
filling a vacuum of thought
then moving on, making way for more:
will the lights go off,
what is that sore that won’t heal,
how long will the honeybees last,
the monarch butterflies, the thunder
behind the house? That Gaza
is the symbol for strife,
set to stand for generations more,
speaks to a larger fear:
what chaos will tempt
the future, what immortal
bitterness lodge itself into
the blood of humanity
like the virus we expect
to kill us all? And then whipsaw
back, I will, to wondering
what skittered past my leg,
what tenebrous creation
provoked the corner of my eye
and made me think again of Gaza.
_____________
Philip Kirsch
Review by Bruce Parker
Phil Kirsch’s “State of Mind” is a quiet poem which might, among louder voices, be overlooked. It deals with ideas, which might, among more personal voices, be skipped over. It has a fine turn, “That Gaza / *** // speaks to a larger fear,” which, in turn, makes me think of the poem as turned on a lathe, smoothed and curved. The subsequent lines recall Yeats’s “The Second Coming” in its foreboding that goes beyond the personal. Then I come to that wonderful word, “tenebrous,” meaning dark, shadowy, obscure, its lovely, relaxed, Latinate unfolding. My father the technical writer would praise that word choice; he insisted on the right word for the right thing. It echoes the service of tenebrae, in which candles are successively extinguished the last three days of Holy Week to commemorate the sufferings and death of Christ. Coupled with the word “creation” this word provoked the corner of this reader’s eye and made me think of more, much more, than even Gaza.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre / Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, / Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, / Immortal seeing ever? / Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, / A fear may choke in our veins / And the startled blood may stop. (from Isaac Rosenberg, Dead man’s dump)
Waiting for the final straw, Gaza tends to surface in our minds, like a bloated corpse from the abyss. In our minds, well insulated but somehow present and half-aware as if in a dreamscape, Gaza is more than a warzone, more than a collection of war crimes, more than even ethnic cleansing. Gaza is a mirror of all that is blindness. And like all that is blindness, it has made its home in the corner of our eyes where lies can’t reach, in the depths of our ears where deceits won’t stretch. Images follow the scattered news that we try to avoid, but still filter, images we push back, images that tend to burrow…
With his tortured upturned sight, / So we crashed round the bend, / We heard his weak scream, / We heard his very last sound, / And our wheels grazed his dead face. (from Isaac Rosenberg, Dead man’s dump)