News from the Muse

News from the Muse of Lament and Dissent

Sara Spaulding-Phillips

Introduction

You are a story fed by generations
You carry songs of grief, triumph
Loss and joy
Feel their power as they ascend
Within you
            Joy Harjo “Prepare”
            Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light p. 86

Our world has changed drastically since last month, when the Muse of Lament and Dissent published the first of a series of political poems written by members of the Deep River Poetry Circle. On June 14th “No Kings” demonstrations all over our land brought some 6 million Americans out into the streets and public squares to give voice to their lament and dissent about the state of our country. In peaceful gatherings with handmade signs they protested the authoritarian regime which sends masked ICE agents to rip terrified immigrants out of their jobs and lives without due process, sends marauding DOGE members and their chainsaw wielding leader to fire thousands of civil servants and the staff of USAID without cause, and threatens Veterans Benefits, Social Security and Medicaid in order to give tax cuts to billionaires; I could go on. 

But, also during this month many of us learned of the “3.5% Rule” developed by political scientist Erica Chenowith, which says that authoritarian regimes have a difficult time withstanding the power of their people once 3.5% of the population mobilizes against them. This gives me hope and courage. Less hopeful is the President’s decision to go to war with Iran on June 21st, using enormous bunker busting bombs. Many believe this escalation will encourage Iran to continue to develop a nuclear weapon. How did we land in this dangerous hell realm? How did the way of life we took for granted just a few months ago get ripped to shreds? 

Note: If you are grateful to the activist group indivisible, which organized the “No Kings” as well as the earlier “Hands Off” demonstrations, please consider joining and/or donating to them: (indivisible.org). 

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

Jacqueline Thurston’s prose poem, “The Moon is a River of Darkness” braves an excruciating issue of our times, about a people whose lives have literally been ripped to shreds. On the wings of poetic imagination, we are transported to Gaza where the poem’s speaker is engaged in a heroic mission to sooth a terrified Palestinian child, and to find the Israeli activist Vivian Silver who disappeared on October 7th. Silver “linked arms with Palestinians and marched in protests” against the Israeli government’s denial of Palestinian rights. The poem’s speaker reveals that she wears her “rage like a buoy lighting the way.” But rage, and lighted buoys, tend to burn themselves out.

In the second section of the poem the speaker’s heroic determination unravels as she confesses: “I will do none of these things.” Like many of us who have suffered the horrors of the news from Gaza since the war began, the poem’s speaker is caught in an agonizing paralysis. She is back in painful reality—polarized America. She sees the dreadful truth--the slaughter, the devastation, the starvation and the echoes of the war in our own land. And then she reveals the horrible truth of Silver’s fate. In America today, protesting the war in Gaza can get you arrested for antisemitism even if you are a Jew. How can anything be solved in such times?

Thurston uses her own artwork as a kind of balm for her searing vision. Three strong images and her commentary on them illuminate her text and provide a counterpoint to the terrible truths of her poem. She reaches back in time for a Bob Dylan song from another difficult era and a poem about singing by Bertold Brecht. She ends her moving poem with a poignant peace “Offering” of seashell, feather and the uplifting image of the Holy Land as a flyway for migrating birds. 

Note: When I wrote this prose poem in November of 2023, I was enraged at the violence inflicted by two Semitic peoples upon one another. At that time, I could not have envisioned the heart-breaking images of starving children and a land reduced to rubble. I am heartened by the blunt assessment of Ehud Olmert, the twelfth Prime Minister of Israel, which appeared in an edition of Haaretz in late May of 2025.“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” I continue to believe in the mission of inter-faith groups like Combatants for Peace and Women Wage Peace, but my days are filled with foreboding about the perilous times in which we are living.

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

Prose poem and images by Jacqueline Thurston
November 8, 2023

I will plunge through the gate at the Rafa border crossing and make my way to the heart of a city encircled by tanks. Wash the concrete and blood from the frightened face of a Palestinian child with enormous brown eyes and banish the nightmare that her life has become. Whisper “Malesh,” (“It doesn’t matter.”) knowing, of course, that it does matter, and croon “Fi Amanillah” (“In the protection of God.”)—over and over and over—until she stops sobbing. Make my way into the catacombs of Hamas’s underground city. When I find Vivian Silver, and I will find her, I will deliver her to her sons, their faces rivers of grief, who wait for her on the other side of a broken fence. How can these men who hold her prisoner not know she has dedicated her life to peace, driven ill children to Jerusalem for medical treatments, linked arms with Palestinians and marched in protests, believed she and they were comrades bound by a shared cause. I will walk through concrete walls, burning rubble, smoke-filled air—wearing my righteous anger like a buoy lighting the way through a difficult channel to the safety of a small calm port at night. I will turn Antony Blinken into a pillar of salt and release him from his prison of diplomatic rationality only when he brings this madness to an end.

“Between Two Worlds”

Mixed media image symbolizing the separate realms inhabited by hope and despair

and the secret inner world of the soul in contrast to the known elements of the outer world.

I will do none of these things. I will stare at the white ceiling of my study streaked with shadows cast by the streetlight outside my home and wait to be taken into the arms of night and finally sleep. In the morning, I will awaken to grim photographs of Palestinians being pulled from the rubble; a boy, barely ten, will turn away from the camera in anguish screaming. A child himself, he has just pulled the bodies of two children from a collapsed building. Two U.S. senators will visit kibbutzim, pause in front of uninhabitable homes, smell the stench of burnt rubber and human flesh, offer predictable platitudes, and leave.

I will listen to a Stanford student, a Syrian refugee studying computer science, describe being mowed down by a “white man with dirty blond hair” spewing curses and shouting “Fuck you and your people!” The young university student, a refugee from a war-torn country, will acknowledge that his attacker’s “hateful screams . . . still echo in my ears.” A woman who believed she was crashing her car into a Jewish school will be arrested by police in Indiana. The school, the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, is in fact an extremist organization that is anti-Israel. A sixty-nine-year-old Jew will decide to attend a pro-Israel rally in Southern California. He will be struck by a pro-Palestinian man with a megaphone and fall to the ground. His accused assailant will call 911, but the victim will die of massive head injuries in an antiseptic hospital.

“Genesis”

Mixed media image, an emblem of 

the interplay of dynamic, creative, and destructive forces.

Five weeks after the Hamas attack, Vivian Silver’s remains will be found in the charred detritus of the safe room in which she sought shelter. Hundreds of members of Women Wage Peace, an Israeli organization she co-chaired, will raise their voices in song at a celebration of her life. “How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?” The answer, my friend, cannot be “blowin’ in the wind,” for as Dylan’s edgy voice reminds us, “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.”

I will reach back in time; retrieve the words of a playwright and poet who fled his homeland and settled in an adopted beach community filled with palm trees, sunlight, and other German refugee intellectuals, only to be uprooted once again and cross an ocean to the land of his ancestors—his return driven by the McCarthy-era investigations.

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing

About the dark times.

—Bertolt Brecht

“Offering”

Photograph celebrating fragile gifts from the sky and sea. (Bordered by a great sea to the West,

the Holy Land is a flyway for hundreds of different species of migrating birds.)

About Deep River: My creative life has been enriched by being a member of Deep River, a community of rare soul and substance. I have been nourished by the poems forged by members of this community and am grateful to Naomi Lowinsky, who has introduced us to many wonderful contemporary poets and shared her poems with us.