​How To Distract
"about my grandma's village in the West Bank, it's been torched and olive and almond trees cut down these past few weeks…” —Naomi Shihab Nye on Facebook
​
1
A hard rain stripped the tender
New azalea blooms
Now a pale pink skirt
Flattened on the ground.

All I can think--
The three-year-old girl
Wearing a pink dress.
Blown in half.
​
2
Captive, I watch the massacre
Like all of us, day after year
After years, yet still feel a glimmer 
Of some small, hopeless 
Hope for peace before--
Before all the mass graves of barely shrouded skeletons overflow.
And children, like a small galaxy of stars, sleep under rubble. 
All that light—buried.

You, old friend, say the word is war.
I say what I see—massacre. You
Say I don’t know what I see;
I’ve not read enough history.
But what do women and small children
Have to do with history. Or Mass
Killing. Mass atrocity. Ethnic
Cleansing, genocide,
Crimes against humanity. Apocalypse.
Then you support Hamas, you say. Nausea
Like gravity all day, seeing
Severed breasts tossed
Like bloody rubber toys
From man to man
Laughing, as she dies.

3
They torched her grandmother’s village
She says, olive and almond trees
Cut down these past few weeks
While you and I argued
Legal definitions and debated
Back to the Canaanites and a headline
Read “How to Distract a Starving Child.”
​
It’s the cheapest way to kill.
The human heart shrinks. A muscle
The body eats. You and I
Claim, explain, accuse, defend
While our hands smudge
Blood on everything we touch
And children are forced
To eat their own hearts.

This poem is from Chivas' completed manuscript of a second collection, Summertime in America, which features two groups of poems about the Israel-Hamas war. These poems strive to fathom the lived experiences of Israeli and Palestinian women. They also aim to eclipse politics, amplify multiple perspectives, avoid retraumatization in the telling, and speak to the unspeakable.​

On Receiving an Email Forward Containing Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize Winning Photograph and a Plea for Gratitude

​are gratitude and hunger linked?
would the focus and faithfulness
of a monk who thanks god
with every breath
relieve starvation? and is such thankfulness
possible in this sphere of excess? perhaps
i should deprive myself
to achieve constant gratitude, because
even the memory of hunger, mild though
it was--like the third-grade day i went
to the school nurse, my stomach an ache
of emptiness--does little for the woman
who never has to worry if she forgets
her microwave lunch, her office flanked
by restaurants, her credit cards
eager to stand in for a depleted atm.

of course going to the nurse for hunger
is a luxury, knowing this you know
the child knew the hunger wouldn’t last–
believed, at least back then, in the system.
so you know the girl was lucky, but even
still . . . . if i drew a picture of that girl--
her belly aching--every morning before
i left the house, sketching in the kids at school calling
her anorexic, laughing, if i said ‘thank you god
for this food’ before i took a bite of anything,
the way some people do, would the famine-stricken
countries prosper? would any person
live a single minute longer, would
one child’s ascites begin to heal?

the boy in Kevin Carter’s picture did not suffer
from our lack of gratitude. some other sickness
weakened him for the vulture’s pleasure.
i won’t disclaim my part in it or pretend to know
its name. and when Carter killed
himself three months later, that wasn’t lack of gratitude
either, though some might call it that.
even if i understood in the midst of the traffic jam,
the flu, the break-up, how lucky i am, what could
i possibly make of it except that the world is unfair?
and wouldn’t it be odd to thank anyone for such deplorable excess?

​This poem was previously published in Knock Journal.