I am not a poet.
I am just a woman who writes because I need to.
To get it all out of me.
A woman who needs to wail quite often, more than she wants to.
To empty what accumulates in her soul, more rapidly than her heart can handle.
In any way she can, either it is in writing, in making things, in coming together with human beings, to share this. This madness. This insanity. This recklessness.
To touch my own core, and to touch others’.
To touch.
To be touched.
It’s been so long now that every morning, upon waking up, instead of waking to my garden’s awakenings, walking up to the raging creek behind it, to listen to the ‘news’, I wake up to see on this device that supposedly connects me to the world, an image unimaginable.
Indescribable.
A maddening image.
An image that cannot be hidden once it is seen, ever again.
No way to have a ‘redo’.
Deciding to escape to my lush gardens after ‘seeing’ only amplifies the disbelief.
Our atrocious failures to coexist.
Our rampant collective superiority complexes.
And many more images follow.
They follow, and follow, and follow. Relentlessly.
Not trickling but gushing from one to another. Melding charred skins, exposed bones, guts spilling.
No words can even touch the places in the heart that these images hit, stab, and twist.
Insides exposed and spirits on fire.
Everything is on fire. Nothing remains in tact.
The Touching of corpses.
Touching such epic darkness, we have, yet we haven’t, touched so intimately, in our lifetime.
Skeletons in the closets burnt to ashes, closets and all.
In tents, while walking ghostly on dusty and blurry roads only utter devastation can make.
Walking through ashy air, and soil.
Drinking ashy water, or not drinking at all.
Bodies starving, walking, kneeling, and at last falling on the ground.
Soiled humanity.
Disgracefulness.
Humans hardly standing, dragging, holding, carrying dismembered humans.
Severed bonds, sacred attachments.
Humans that are alive touching the remaining skins of humans that are not.
What remains of our souls after being so gut-wrenchingly bullied, stripped of dignity, of life, of humanity, of EVERYTHING?
Scorching, scarring, scaring any glimpses of hope away.
Frightening our days. How could all of this be?
And yet, we touch!
We touch each other.
We insist.
As touch is all that remains.
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Orly
Your writing is poetry, dear Orly, and like all good poetry, your words touch the heart. I feel such grief in your words, in this terrible reality you give voice to.
Thank you for never turning away, for always seeing with your entire shattered heart and soul, and for sharing.