Welcome to my second posting for National Poetry Month! Today’s poet is Israeli-born poet, Michal Rubin. I was connected to Michal via email through a mutual friend about a year ago. In February of this year, we finally met in person. In between I took the opportunity to read her compelling poems.

Michal has lived in the United States for 37 years, but Israel is still home, and yet she’s ashamed of what her home country is doing in the Middle East, specifically to the people in Gaza. I recently introduced her for an open mic and she said, “This period of political writing was inspired by Amanda Gorman’s poem during President Biden’s inauguration. I remember saying to myself, ‘Ok, everything you feel, your rebuke of Israel, the dismantling of the stories you grew up with, all of it can be expressed in poetry.’”

Rubin listened to that inner voice and has written with the eye of an observer from a new home, and with the broken heart of one still connected to the place of her birth. That tension of having both allows her a vantage point of stark honesty without being oversentimental. The war between Isreal and Palestine began October 7, 2023. These books are a record.

From her book, Home Visit, she writes of what has been lost through week fifty-two of the war, ‘… number of demolished structures: 957; number of girls who lost their homes: 235; … number of women who were displaced: 258; number of boys who became homeless: 276; …number of men whose houses were bulldozed: 288; …number of affected people due to demolished structures: 28,474; … number of red torn curtains ~ 2, 015; …number of clothes-filled bundles: maybe 3,000; … number of keys without doors: estimated 3,525 …

In there are days that I am dead, the poems are arranged similar to a diary entry, each one dated and noted as the number of days since the war started. Each poem a brief recollection of that day’s sights, sounds, and emotions.

Michal latest work, Your Stories Look Me in the Eyes, is a collaboration with Palestinian poet, Basman Derawi. Michal and Basman met during a Zoom poetry workshop, with Michal immediately reaching out to Basman with a poem, Words Inside My Body. Through its repeating refrain, … When I hear you say, I am from Gaza … Rubin describes her fear of each other’s blindness to the other, and her shame of what her people are doing to his stories. The reader also feels her yearning to know the other, ‘… I want to imagine the unimaginable/show me pictures of your street before/ and after …  

Basman replied with a poem of his own, When I Hear You Say. In between his repeating refrain, ‘… When I hear you say I am from Isreal …’ Basman admits to his blood boiling. But then he ends, ‘When I hear you say/I am from Israel/ And you unzip your chest/handing me your heart//Same hearts, same humanity/I breathe again/I almost cry.

Thus begins a dialogue between two poets, two humans, cautiously trusting each other as they search for common ground through their poetry, each signing their poems like a letter. They are more than letters to each other; they are letters to us as well.

I always encourage folks to purchase from independent booksellers and small presses, so here’s where Michal’s books can be found:

Home Visit Cathexis Northwest Press

there are days that I am dead Fomite Press

Your Stories Look Me in the Eyes Fomite Press

And the Bones Stay Dry, Home Visit, and there are days that I am dead can also be purchased through Bookshop.org