The War for Poets

Oh Ahmad

There is nothing I can do or say
to prevent your intention
to blow yourself up
with those you hate.
But I would like you to know anyway
that at the end of your last prayer
when you turn your head to the
right
and say
asalâmu ‘alâykum wa râhmat u-llah wa-barakâtuhu
you have greeted me too
as I am there, right beside you
with the whole of Mankind
because your Lord is my breath

Then, when you turn
your head to the
left
and repeat for the last time
asalâmu ‘alâykum wa râhmat u-llah wa-barakâtuhu
I am there too, with the whole universe
because everywhere you turn
there is His face
and your Lord is my breath

Even when
your hands and forehead touch the ground
and you say to your Lord with a deep sense of fulfillment
Hu
we are all there
right beneath you
with our foreheads and hands and knees and toes
touching yours from the ground.
So, just before you press the button
with your call Akbar
know that we are always between you and your Lord
because
He is our breath

Narda Azaria Dalgleish - 2002 and 17 October 2004 [1]

First impressions and assumptions may not do with poetry given the underlying mysteries of its creation and its inherent ambiguities, for so I would especially caution with now post-modern inventions of the universal borne out of the necessity of addressing minds at once hostile and foreign as well as impressionable and malleable.

Such poetry may be the work of war overlooked, for being the work of peace, generals, in general, haven't control of it but know that changes in language spell changes in political and social behavior.  No other technology finds its targets and rearranges elements within our heads quite so well, nor finds so enthused a reception when at last those who need to hear or read it decide for themselves both to hear and to read.

Unlike propaganda and rhetoric, poetry, if it's going to be worth the meditation it inspires, has in its invention organic qualities not quite altogether human but rather of nature and the divine. If given to romance, we may delight in it as in a garden; if given to death and violence, we may listen, sober, all the more.

Is Narda's poem an embrace, a caution,  a reprimand?

Consider these two separate sentences from Narda's page at Wise Earth:

A year or so after 9/11, when the world was still stirred, looking to understand the causes and express its diverse response, it was a surprise to find that I was afraid. Apprehensive even about disclosing my nationality to people, as for a while Israel was held directly responsible . . . .  In early October 2004, exactly 17 years after I came to the United Kingdom to study and contemplate the Unity of Mankind, ( The Beshara School ) my son, Rotem Moria, was blown-up by Al-Qaeda in Sinai. [1]

A sentence of legalese, or bad reporting, sets out to wrap and constrain behavioral possibility with some semblance of iron logic, but a poem, as carefully crafted but with greater existential purpose--i.e., a purpose in or having to do with being--strikes at the near fixed metonymies of old language and thereby opens channels to new thought and, perhaps, so we may hope, more helpful perception in the service of much needed cultural progress.

In my world, and my world is a great library, the experience of language, and this across arts, crafts, and professions and shot through the human life cylce, is the experience of culture.  It is this precisely that makes the web sites of Jihad recruiters so remarkably dangerous and worth every country's review of its laws pertaining to sedition; it is this also that makes essential the call for new poetry that intuitively grapples and struggles with the language and psychology of extant and pernicious political realities. 

For this thought I credit Melanie Phillips' latest theme [2]: academic and political bandwagons have gone far into the adoption of both the most hateful and ludicrous dogma when it comes to Israel and the Jews in particular and conservative thought in general.  Perhaps the New Old Now Old Left's corrupt and decadent society needs to face some new set of emerging artists and critics from within its own drifted ranks.

Welcome, from this page at least, the next new worldwide generation of ethically and morally coherent and striving poets.

Reference

1. Dalgeish, Narda Azaria.  "Oh Ahmad."  Reposted with permission.  Wiser Earth, n.d.: http://www.wiserearth.org/user/azariarahamim

2. Phillips, Melanie.  The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power.  New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010.

Recommended Reference

Beshara: http://www.beshara.org/index.html

Phillips, Melanie.  Londonistan.  New York: Encounter Books, 2006.

Shepherd, Robin.  A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem with Israel.  London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009.

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