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by Nancy Kassell (Author)
They were little girls, the age of flowers,
said their mother Asma, who found
and buried them herself after the bombing
To perish so before full bloom
Gaza. 2025. Asma does for her daughters the only thing she can do now, bury them. A girl raped in Nigeria, a girl displaced in Ukraine, a woman poet arrested by Nazis in Warsaw 1942. The United States 2025. Recurring cycles of conflict and war seem so alike at times that they become almost ahistorical. It is women, uniquely bonded to nature, who do most of the work of repair and recovery. The work of continuity.
But just who are we humans, who ricochet between destroying and creating? In a poem about children's first, stick-figure drawings (Ground) I write,
This is how we are made
what it is to look human
they are telling us...
The skeleton shows through.
I think a lot about the skeleton of human nature.
And so, the arts arm themselves. In what she describes as portraits of people, the painter Alice Neel asks, We are all creatures in a way, aren't we? (Nude Self-Portrait). The quest for a common humanity continues. Meanwhile, historical time, like nature, may be circular, but each individual life is linear, and in this chapbook, I honor two people I have lost, my companion, an historian, and my daughter, a filmmaker. We inhabit time and nature and within these spaces try
to know:
Who or what needs care and what kind
Who gives it, how it is given and received.
