Poetry collection by Michal Rubin

10/15/2023

"From the South Carolina patio I watch news from my other home, Israel, counting the dead after seven days of war that is flooding homes, streets...all ground my feet knew so well, and the ground of our neighbors, where my feet have not traveled.

The poems in this collection have been written throughout the past couple of years, and are in no way an up-to-the-minute record of the events unfolding between Israel and Palestine. They are but my reflection and the expression of my own battle between my attachment to Israel, the home of my childhood, and my heart ache over Israeli politics as it relates to the Palestinian people. I have long been torn between leaving Israel and loving it, all while facing the truth and deceptions in the telling of its modern history. The poems weave a story of finding refuge and home of one

Today, as I write this forward, the map of my wrestling is plastered on every news outlet, across social media, and on the faces of my friends and family. I recollect my childhood fears of my imagined atrocities of war as I sat in a bomb shelter, a twelve-year-old with my mother and our neighbors. Then later in the day, I face my very adult fears of antisemitism intermingled with my shame and pain for my country's behavior in the occupied Palestinian territories. The fears are no longer painted in muted, careful colors, but in a garish bold cruelty. The visions of atrocities that were fears of a twelve-year-old, no longer are imagined fears but the reality of the savagery my people and our neighbors are drowning in. My

poems are a telling of my small corner of this story of two peoples who have lost their way and continue to wander in the desert of the

human shadows. May we find a way to see the humanity of each other."