"My Partisan Grief, Supernova, October 7, 2023"

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "My Partisan Grief, Supernova, October 7, 2023" by Owen Lewis. Lewis is a psychiatrist and an award winning poet whose newest collection of poems, A Prayer of Six Wings, addresses the October 7 terrorism in Gaza, and his own multi-generational Jewish experience. As a frequent visitor to his daughter and grandchildren in Tel Aviv, Israel, his poems are deeply personal. He has been an eloquent advocate for Jews and Palestinians to understand each other better through the voices of their poets. At Columbia University, he is a professor of psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics, and teaches narrative medicine.

My Partisan Grief, Supernova, October 7, 2023

By Owen Lewis

These are my cousins.

I don’t know them. These

My sons, daughters, young lovers

and friends. I don’t know them.

Their music fills the desert sky.

They dance to wed the Negev night.

Before dawn, the stars have fled.

Those watchful stars like angel eyes.

Who silenced your angels?

You’ve lost your song.

The light is old and bitter,

breaks the dark

these sudden sparks start at a rifle’s mouth.

Mouth to mouth silenced.

What unsilenced rage

wrangles through raging hearts?

Not glinted stars these quicker knives

quickening life-exits.

What music now, here

In the vast and moving desert,

these vast and unmoving rocks,

the vast and unforgiving grief—

my cousins

my sons

my daughters.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.