Anniversaries Suck

Our bodies and brains keep the score, along with our minds and hearts.

Sunrise, Sioux River. Photo © Jamie Young.

Tomorrow marks two years since the horrific and brutal massacres carried out in Israel by Hamas, when armed terrorists swooped into villages and kibbutzes and a music festival and through the countryside, torturing, killing, and kidnapping Israelis.

The day after that marks two years since the Israeli government began a series of horrific and brutal responses to that massacre, which have been going on ever since, leveling much of Gaza and injuring and killing thousands of Palestinians.

I had a long post planned, which I decided to scrap after a series of painful encounters with people on both sides of the conflict: Jews who refuse to acknowledge what’s been going on in Gaza for the last two years, and Palestinians who refuse to acknowledge what Hamas did on October 7, 2023.

The trauma and rage and grief of the last two years—of the last 100 years, really—is too big for words, especially as this anniversary approaches.

Instead, I offer you a photograph taken by my husband and a poem that feels appropriate. I hope they’re helpful in some way.

INCANTATION

May it pass, we say, meaning
this trouble, this despair.

May we wake up to another
breath, each cell on fire.

May we use what makes us human—
blood pulse, fear rush, the surge

of tenderness—to resist
oblivion, not welcome it.

May we remember the way
love passes through the body

like air through a bird's syrinx,
makes music from muscle

and bone, transfusing
and transforming as it flows.