This piece is part of our Witnessing series, which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the experiences of Jewish writers around the globe in the aftermath of October 7th.
It is critical to understand history not just through the books that will be written later, but also through the first-hand testimonies and real-time accounting of events as they occur. At Jewish Book Council, we understand the value of these written testimonials and of sharing these individual experiences. It’s more important now than ever to give space to these voices and narratives.
“I stood close as targets do”
-Rosa Lane
Tuesday morning 7:27 AM and I am
as naked as the morning still in bed
not alone but clean still from where we
met in the bath last night our medallion
love stickered and true and there I lay
7:27 lifted by a siren first from the next town
over something just off but close then
our own – like a toddler between us so loud as if
from under the bed inside the windows
between my ears our first siren in
the new house and yesterday my mother
at 87 3 times lugged to her saferoom
in her wheelchair grab a nightgown
and glasses, flip flops and phone down
the long flight of unfamiliar stairs
to the garage I never thought I’d ever have
all poured cement and safe when halfway
down the booms of missile hitting missile
and shrapnel that knows gravity like we all
know gravity and still outside this old
body tumbling to safety or maybe
safely taking a tumble.
*
And all along we believed in the cold blue barrel of it, the gun closet full the smell of gunpowder from homemade bullets target practice in the basement and belly down in tall grass a .22 pushed to the shoulder of your 3 year old body hit cans that cold blue so cold it could suck the sunshine from the sky and dungeon it out of sight we thought this must be good only it never was: bullets entering like secrets, full lipped and plosive unzip the can the spill of roe and the bedsit rubied the schoolroom drowned the hospital awake in flame. Remind me of the good what deterrent means cause I’m blind. Always have been and now. Blind.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author, based on their observations and experiences.
Support the work of Jewish Book Council and become a member today.
Poet, essayist, translator and Fulbright Scholar, Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize and was published by Tebot Bach in January 2020. She is also the author of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize). Rachel’s work has appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist and Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. Her awards include the Crab Orchard Review Richard Peterson Prize, The Passager Prize, and nominations for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel is also the co-editor of Stained: an anthology of creative writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, July 2023) and her scholarly work Thought and New Language in the Menstrual Poem is due out from Palgrave MacMillan in 2026. Rachel earned her PhD from The University of Southern California, where her research concerned menstruation in contemporary poetry. She is currently a Fulbright Post Doc in Israel translating the poems of Holocaust poet Abba Kovner and she is also the Poetry Editor at Judith Magazine.