Tenderness {a poem for 10/7 from the Diaspora}

I read these words as I skimmed my email
and took the first sips of strong coffee
in my home, where, perhaps naively,
I did not particularly worry last night
about ICE agents raiding my home, but did
wake every hour as the time zone in Israel
approached morning, knowing that
two years ago today, mothers just like me slept
in their beds, beds they did not expect
to be stormed by men with rifles and weapons
of sexual violence and machetes and cell phones
they would use to call their mothers to say
I got another Jew, men with truck beds for hauling
bodies dead and alive across the flimsy border
those desert dwellers trusted was a gesture
of goodwill and not a doorway to hell.

All night, awake, knowing that to speak
of this sorrow and the anger that still haunts me
will rattle some, who ask why do I not express
this same sorrow and anger about the neighboring
mothers, the rubble and rage next door?

For two years, I have asked myself these questions
like a relentless persecutor. What is wrong
with you, what is wrong with you, what is wrong
with you, now do you see, now will you say it,
now will you change your tune, write a new poem,
frontline tenderness instead of this willful
one-sided sorry excuse for being a compassionate person?
What kind of Jew are you anyway?

For two years, I have been sitting on the stand,
my heart a crowded, lonely courtroom.
For two years, I have consumed every possible
way of seeing the livestream or horror
that has become the epicenter of history,
I have seen history twisted and rewritten,
my people’s kaleidoscopic wonders flattened
to one-liners and Instagram charts made by
Pilates instructors, and yes, I have also seen
and heard the anguished calls from inside the house
saying this isn’t us, this isn’t us, and I have
failed and failed and failed after a lifetime of success,
failed to ace the test of pleasing the people
who thought they could depend on me
to say, down with capitalism, down with conquests,
down with oligarchs, down with oppression,
down with bombs, down with brutality,
who thought I would grieve the betrayal
of trust and optimism that fueled me,
say Kaddish, call it intergenerational trauma,
and move on to writing op-eds condemning Israel.

For two years, I have been at turns defiant,
deflated, and a deer in the headlights,
all the while willing my heart to change,
berating myself for not walking away
from my stubborn allegiances,
or at least widening them,
at least favoring tenderness over toughness,
at least making the effort, for the love of God,
to be the person perhaps even I thought I was,
one whose loyalty to my people and our homeland
doesn’t make me a monster or a liar
but a Jew, who, only after allowing herself
to spill these unpopular truths on the page,
can say, stop telling us who we are,
fuck your vigils for the martyrs of October 7,
keep your frenzied memes,
give us back our people,
and end this fucking war.