Landays for Wilmington & Palestine
January, 2024
1.
It has snowed all day in Wilmington.
Grey clouds have severed every natural ray of light.
2.
Joe Biden rings a bell in a church.
Out fall the broken bodies of thirteen dead sparrows.
3.
Snow conceals the rectory statue.
The Virgin is sobbing beneath a layer of ice.
4.
Here the Sixth Sorrow is carved in stone.
In Gaza a mother kneels near the corpse of her son.
5.
The Brandywine River still runs cold
with the lifeless bodies of DuPont’s gunpowder men.
6.
The path to the Brandywine is sealed.
Fathers are carrying their children in plastic bags.
7.
Who taught you these vile miracles, Joe?
You turned five loaves of bread into five hundred missiles.
8.
I’ve forgotten the words to the hymns
but not the blighted music of your merciless voice.
9.
Sometimes I wish I had never seen
the tunnel that runs from Wilmington to Tel Aviv.
10.
A soldier aimed a gun at my son.
I froze as the checkpoint became one with my body.
11.
The sound of a child’s shriek on the screen
detonates a fiery charge beneath my pillow.
12.
The snow has been melting since morning.
The wide-eyed trembling children have turned me into rain.
13.
The churchyard is a maze of white lace.
Bodies wrapped in sheets remain like ghostly mounds of snow.
14.
Wilmington is not the capital
of Delaware—and Dover is not in Palestine.
15.
I will no longer curse, shriek, or scream.
Like Christ I will find the secret prayer to levitate.
Dr. Kim Jensen is a Baltimore-based writer, poet, educator, and translator who has lived in California, France, and Palestine. Her books include an experimental novel, The Woman I Left Behind, and two collections of poems, Bread Alone and The Only Thing that Matters. Active in transnational peace and social justice movements for decades, Kim’s writings have been featured or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Boulevard, Anthropocene, Consequence, Modern Poetry in Translation, Arkansas International, Decolonial Passage, Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, Anomaly, Extraordinary Rendition: Writers Speak Out on Palestine, Gaza Unsilenced, Bomb Magazine, Sukoon, Mizna, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, Left Curve, Liberation Literature, and many others. In 2001, she won the Raymond Carver Award for short fiction. Kim is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she co-founded an interdisciplinary literacy initiative that demonstrates the vital connection between classroom learning and social justice in the broader community.