‘Round Midnight

By Michael Dickel on Friday, 10 November, 2023 • ( Leave a comment )

Poetry and Art after October 7, 2023

Devorah Roytenberg Charash
Ceramicist / Photographer

Michael Dickel
Poet

‘Round Midnight I — No lullaby will do

		But it really gets bad
		'Round midnight*

I tell everyone we’re safe
because we are in our home,
we have food, water, each other,
the rockets aren’t aimed at our city
…much. No siren since last week
has howled, the phone alert stays
quiet, for now.

                         Still, I lie in bed awake
late tonight. Am I waiting for the siren?
No, I have spent the day
listening to thuds in the air,
booms, screams in the distance
too far to hear,
further, but more forceful
than the soft thunder this afternoon,
more intense than the few moments
of shower from the passing cloud.

                       The storm I hear
in the south, in the north, the east—
that storm has raged for decades,
from before I was born, and I hear
those yesterday-echoes, too.

Yet mostly I lie in bed at night and hear
the coming storm, the one after I am gone,
when my children, whom I try to protect now,
will be the ones tossing and turning.

                                                         Or possibly worse,
they will have joined those who no longer sleep or wake,
the ones whose screams keep adults on all sides from
resting in peace, unable to hold the other parents that they
know burn in the deepest, unimaginably dark, grief.

		For love is strong as death,
		Harsh as the grave.
		Its tongues are flames, a fierce
		And holy blaze.
				—The Song of Songs (8:6 lines 3–6†)

										23 October 2023 almost midnight

‘Round Midnight II — Remedial herbology

		Feelin' sad
		Really gets bad
		Round, Round, Round Midnight*

I take my antidepressant in the morning
with minerals and vitamins and herbs,
and my anti-anxiety in the evening
with more herbs and minerals.
The minerals build my ravaged
skeleton and ease my leg veins;
the herbs fight inflammation and
soothsay my prostate’s health.

The antidepressant keeps my head
above the flooded rivers’ flow
while the anti-anxiety allows
me to tread water with my family
while Hamas and Hezbollah
attack and Israel retaliates.
With my head spinning back
and forth, I only see sweat,
blood, and tears spraying across
the borders.

                     Ice melts, rivers flood, 
seas rise, forests burn, storms wreak
havoc never seen before as I watch—
spell bound by the massive killing
fields so fearfully close in my chest
yet too distant in my head
to even hazily see.

No herb, mineral, or drug remedies
my inability to find nutrition or
sensibility in the crops we reap
from this spurned, generous earth.

		Endless seas and floods,
		Torrents and rivers
		Never put out love’s
		Infinite fires.
				—The Song of Songs (8:7 lines 1–2†)

					24 October 2023 a little after midnight