Poetry in the face of history: Keep counting

In Émile Zola's novel La Fortune des Rougon, first in a 20-volume epic titled Les Rougon-Macquart, there is a love story in the backdrop of the 1851 coup d'etat in France that brought about the Second Empire. Miette and Silvère, the lovers, and Republican sympathizers, die on the battlefield by the fire of the coup. Their love and death are often described as the defeat of poetry in the face of history. But under what conditions could this confrontation between poetry and history yield to the defeat of history? And what is it in poetry that could defeat history? Is it the simple act of bearing witness? The deep sharp gaze? The pressing quest to embody experience? Or is it the desperate attempt at meaning-making? We don't know. All we know is that we received and read poetry as the Israeli assault on Gaza, next door, rages on targeting people; journalists, poets, and academics among them, and we decided, we share it with you.

 

Keep Counting 

In the beginning was the number. 

11,500 people dead:  

(round number) 

4,710 children will neither forget  

Nor remember their childhood 

3,160 women 

3,180 men 

6,000 more eyelids forever shut  

Under the rubble 

14,500 bodies fertilize the soil 

29,800 wounded  

1.5 million bodies made homeless 

2.2 million people wounded for life 

In all: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 11, 12 13, 14, 15,16,17, 18,19, 20....25....68...119...227....14,500 

Please update 

Keep counting without coffee breaks 

Numbers too are prayers. 

 

Dark clouds mushroom 

Furiously against gravity 

Turn the blue sky black  

The only color at night  

Is the red of missiles 

The per capita share 

Of food and water 

Is a small fraction 

Of the per capita share  

Of explosives 

 

Water is brackish  

Water is a host to coliform 

Soldiers round up ghosts in the hospitals 

Prayers are medication 

Are oxygen 

The human experiment has failed 

Metaphor out of fuel 

  

14,500, 14,499...10,561...9,211...7,324...6,234...2,117...723...722...117...97...46...13...13... 

9...7...3...1...0  

Death is  

And they are not 

Please update 

Keep counting until you get to zero 

Start and end in zero 

Keep counting 

Take coffee breaks 

What is sacrilege is Gaza itself 

Still no end game there 

Say the analysts 

Gaza I say  

Gaza Mon Amour  

The crescent moon in the southern sky 

Is my witness