I suppose I should be packing
for Israel. I leave in a couple of days
for a place at war.
This is a place at war
only not right here where I can see or hear or feel
its shuddering blasts
the way my daughter can.

How do you pack for such a place?
Where do you put your fear? Your sadness? Slipped inside your joy that
soon you will see your children?

Out the window songbirds empty the feeders
as though hunger hounds them, hunts them down.
I ladle more seed to them. It doesn't help.

Inside this laptop someone I have never met but call friend
reveals a gaping agony.
I invite him to come stay. It doesn't help.

On the news tonight reporters feast on
Gaza's endless, heaving pain.
If I knew how to pray, I would.
For all of them. But it wouldn't help.

And so I do what I always do: head outside, stride across the land and then
out in the car along the empty road until winter's chill and isolation's drone
slide a mossy sleeve along the reach of me and my rage sloughs away
to leave me with this:
just this
just here
just now
and my arms out wide.