This has been a holiday season like no other in the long memories of some of the Write Out Loud team. Please forgive us if we were not filled with festive cheer. But you’ll appreciate that it’s difficult to remember that it was the season to be jolly, when our TV screens are filled nightly with such scenes of devastation and suffering and deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, precipitated of course by the appalling atrocities and killings inflicted by Hamas. 

At such a time of unrelenting acts without mercy we have gained some small comfort by reading the poems YOU have been posting on our site. We know Auden said: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” But in the same poem he went on to say that poetry “survives / A way of happening, a mouth.” But your passionate poems remind us that when we feel at our most helpless and ineffective, poetry can at least provide some comfort, some communal, shared compassion - to highlight that we are not indifferent to what is going on in other places as we eat, drink, and try to make merry.

By all means gather round fires with friends and family to mark the turning of the year, and be thankful that we are not suffering as others are. That of course includes those in Ukraine – and in Russia, too – and wherever there are refugees from conflict, confined and living in straitened circumstances through no fault of their own. 

We wish you all a happier 2024. 

 

This poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai was published in his 1971 collection Not for the Sake of Remembering, a few years after the 1967 Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In 1994, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shared the Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestinian National Authority, and Israel’s foreign minister Shimon Peres. Amichai was invited to participate in the prizegiving ceremony, where he read this poem:

 

 

WILDPEACE

 

Not the peace of a cease-fire

not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,

but rather

as in the heart when the excitement is over

and you can talk only about a great weariness.

I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows

how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.

A peace

without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,

without words, without

the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be

light, floating, like lazy white foam.

A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation

to the next, as in a relay race:

the baton never falls.)

 

Let it come

like wildflowers,

suddenly, because the field

must have it: wildpeace.

 

Yehuda Amichai

Translated by Chana Bloch