In Truth

I thought there was a truth

we could agree on: what is

loss, what is calamity.

I bowed my head before a storm

of our own making.

When I looked up, I had folded

all the world into these words.

It was night in a dense forest.

My country turned its back to me.

I opened up to scream, the storm’s wind

rushed in and in the dark, I coughed up

someone else’s grief.

In truth, I thought what if

I made myself so small I never hurt

again. Not me or someone else.

A point so dense and hot with light enough

to animate this armor.

Is this how stars are made or how

they are destroyed? In truth,

I had hope. It softened me

for slaughter. Softened me so bad

I can’t find the end of me

for where my enemy begins.

Am I lost? Or just

calamity. I set my back

against the wind. In the dark,

a single star. I see the forest

for the forest, for the trees.

How did this poem begin for you?

I wrote this poem just after experiencing a loss, and I found that I didn’t know how to mourn that loss while I was witnessing a genocide in Gaza, from a country that has enabled and funded this genocide’s continuing cruelty and devastation. My loss felt like a teardrop in an ocean of loss that wasn’t even mine to grieve but was in some way my responsibility as an American taxpayer. To feel the weight of all this dwarfing my own grief, while being told by my country that to say genocide, to speak out against and protest genocide, was somehow a form of hate, and at the same time being besieged by images of maimed and starving bodies, parents clinging desperately to their dead children—that dissonance felt like a slap in the face. This poem arrived in a rush amid the sting of it.