Poem by Chivas Sandage

​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.​

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Chivas Sandage’s poems have appeared in the Texas Observer, Salmagundi, Southern Humanities Review, Soundings East, and The Long Now, among others. Her work won second place in the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2022 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest. Sandage won the 2021 Claire Keyes Poetry Award for a group of eight poems. Her poetry column, Ms. Muse, has appeared in Ms. Magazine. Her first book, Hidden Drive (Antrim House), was a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry.

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