I originally posted this poem, in July 2009 on my blog, In and Out with Jeff. At the time, I hadn’t yet set up Outdoor Poetry Season, my poetry blog. But a recent traffic report on In and Out shared the news that “A Universe Is Gone” had been visited by a viewer. I couldn’t remember what the poem was about, so I became its second viewer over some long, lonely, unseen, unread, unheard isolation.
It became immediately obvious after visiting the poem that I had not invested any energy in explaining why I had chosen “A Universe Is Gone” as the title. But the “why” of that choice is part of the message of the poem.
A Palestinian boy is caught in a crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian guerillas. He dies, the poem says. If it had pursued that fact further, the poem might have added, more crudely, his life is snuffed out. He is collateral damage.
And his father, Abu? He has lost everything. He holds his son’s limp body, but everything the boy was is gone. Every version of the older boy, the young man, the father, the old grey head that he might have become is also gone.
Two thousand years ago, during the heyday of rabbinical Judaism, some rabbi from yeshiva nestled in the hills around Jerusalem, interpreted a biblical passage to mean, in plain English (or plain Aramaic, anyhow) that whoever saved the life of an individual saved an entire universe.
How’s that for an ethical principle? It means that to the Jews of the Rabbinical period the range of what any given person might achieve during a lifetime was pretty near infinite.
And so, when a Palestinian child is gunned down…
A Universe Is Gone
Remember the Palestinian child
caught in a crossfire, in a lethality of rage?
Crouching behind his father?
Crying with desperate faith
in his abu, his shield?
Moments later, the caption said,
the boy was dead,
his father forlorn
with wounds that will never heal.
Each day dawn comes with new grief.
Neither the garrison state
nor the tender virgins console Abu.
