Did you include peaches?

Autocrats do what they want.

They dont wait for approval.

Maybe when they were children

They got everything they wanted.

(Isnt the weather beautiful for a change?

All that rain was depressing me.)

Im still trying to wrap my head around

Moving a whole hospital,

Everything except the physical building.

Patients from ICU, equipment

Monitors, meds, personnel

To a new distant unspecified location.

If we cant stop Golem-Israel from

Destroying Gaza City

How can we stop world war three?

(If you think this is a stretch,

You and I are living in different realities.

The end of the world is only a little less immanent

Than tomorrows sunrise.)

(Let me see your grocery list.

Did you include peaches?)

I went swimming in the river

Near the place where the tourists hoot

Every half hour

Because they are having so much fun.

I submerged in the turbid water

And immediately felt myself being swept along,

My glasses came off under water.

I reached for them, awkwardly, blindly

And my fingers found them

As they were floating away.

When I surfaced I was laughing.

I was so happy I didnt lose them.

Funny, how averting a completely avoidable disaster

Can create a shift in our outlook.

But my levity didnt last.

I started feeling sad for the Palestinians again,

As I slid and stumbled on the slippery rocks

Of the riverbed,

Making my way to the shore.
.................
This poem juxtaposes upsetting references to Golem-Israels monstrous crimes against humanity in Gaza with allusions to the weather, to hooting tourists and a grocery list, with a reminder to include peaches, a sweet juicy sensual fruit. This juxtaposition of the nightmarish instruction to move a hospital to a new location just because Israel doesnt want it there any more, with my anecdote of going swimming and almost losing my glasses, is surrealistic. What is the thread? Is there one? In the context of my life, losing my glasses under water and finding them against the odds is certainly something worth recounting, in the quotidian context of my own brief Earthwak. My joy was spontaneous and anyone can identify with it, but it only lasts for a moment as my thoughts return to the plight of the Palestinians half a world away. It is as if my plunge in the river was little more than a distraction from my obsession with the plight of a people who have lost literally everything. Another way of putting this: I go to the river for a swim and lose and find my glasses, but my mind and heart journey to Gaza, and that saps the joy out of my life, reducing me to just an old man stumbling on the slippery rocks, making my way back to where I left off with my all-too-real-life. This poem is about how vulnerable I am and how divided I am. Maybe by taking my glasses (and then giving them back), the river was just being a good trickster-teacher. So much to learn, in so short a time! (The anaolgy of what Israel is doing, to the virtual inevitability of WW3 speaks to that brevity, that insecurity of time.) Just a little upstream, as my son and I were standing by the river, preparing to swim, there was a man (with his dog) across the way, fly-fishing off a little island. We watched him cast the lure and he caught something. He waded out and within moments there it was, flailing in the sunlight, a footlong. So, the same river that gave that man a fish stole my glasses and returned them. Who is luckier? Whose life is better? Who is living in Tao and who has a long way to go?