This is a poem, obviously somewhat related to that one.
Written after the massacres in Lebanon.
And it's called "Perhaps no poem,
but all I can say and I cannot be silent."
And it is in a particular kind of way a very autobiographical
poem, because it refers to my rather unusual mixed ancestry.
My father having been from a Hasidic-Jewish family who,
at an early age, read the New Testament when
he was about 19 or so.
And became convinced that Jesus was a Messiah.
I remained very proud of being a Jew, but I was a Christian.
And by the time I was born, he was an Anglican priest
in England.
My mother was Welsh.
So "Perhaps no poem, but all I can say and I cannot be
silent."
As a devout Christian, my father took delight and pride in being
(like Christ and the apostles) a Jew.
It was Hasidic lore, his heritage,
he drew on to know the Holy Spirit as shekhinah.
My Gentile mother, Welsh through and through, and like my father
sustained by deep faith, cherished all her long life
the words of Israel Zangwill who told her:
you have a Jewish soul.
I, their daughter, flesh of their flesh,
bone of their bone, writing in this age
of terror, a libretto about El Salvador, the suffering,
the martyrs,
look from my page to watch the apportioned news--
those foul dollops of history, each day thrusts at us
pushing them into our gullet--
And see, that, in Lebanon, so-called Jews have permitted
so-called Christians to wreak pogrom, thunder of devastation,
on helpless folk of a tribe anciently kin to their own,
and now concentrated in camps.
My father, my mother, I have longed for you.
Now, I see, it is well you are dead.
Dead and gone from time, gone from this time
whose weight of shame your bones, weary already
from your own days and years of tragic history,
could surely not have borne.
[APPLAUSE]