A Hopeless Peace: Introducing the Poetry of Dara Barnat

“A hopeless peace.” This line ends the stunning poem below, Dara Barnat’s “One Kaddish For the World.” All of the humanity stands in this place today. This week we watched three living women come home after 471 days in captivity and hug their mothers. Four more are due to be returned on Shabbat (b'ezrat H’.) There are still 94 to go. Who will make it back? Who will come back alive? Will the process continue to go smoothly or will it be caught up in political games and power plays? We watch. We are happy and yet, and yet…this stone in our hearts…why couldn’t this have happened months and months ago? Before the killing, the death, the destruction, the maiming of so, so many people? And meanwhile, in the United States a new president commits evil acts with the swipe of his pen. Actions that will make the strong the rich more powerful and take away the rights of the poor, the weak and the displaced. Where do we put all of this fear?

Over the next six weeks, as the ceasefire (hopefully!) continues, Judith Poetry will stand in prayer with all of you for kindness to return to our world speedily and in our days. Amen.

One Kaddish for the World

 	 - Tel Aviv, November-December 2024

I.

Where even to start? Maybe 
at five in the morning after the US election. 
I take out Lily, the dog. In the dark we walk, 
and I listen to podcasts about the end 
of the world. It wasn’t supposed 
to be this way. Right? 
I have a class to teach at eight-fifteen.
The students look at me like I am supposed
to know something, which always 
surprises me. I would start with a poem, a prayer, 
or an apology, but this class is not about poetry, religion, 
or politics, so we talk about styles of citation. 
On the way to campus, I drop off 
our son, who in his seven years has lived 
through too much darkness. His Hebrew is far better 
than mine, so there is no language
to speak to protect him. He understands
when I am upset – when it’s hard to be a parent 
in a country in a war, which is also a country
that is only partly my own. 
He is allergic to mosquito bites, and once,
during an allergy test, said to me,
You can be brave too, Mama. Yes, my son. 
I will try. I do try. Sometimes, 
I feel like I succeed, but too often 
I feel like I let the world weigh
too heavily on me, which causes the world to weigh
too heavily on him. Forgive me. 
I will try to be stronger.

II.

Breakfast has to be made. Lunch, dinner. 
With the US election, exactly 
what I feared has happened. What great hope 
so many of us held onto. My list of griefs 
grows ever longer. My father, my grandmother. 
In this country. In that country. In the kitchen, 
the Mourner’s Kaddish comes to mind – 
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chir’itei.
The list grows ever longer, since the election is far 
from the worst this year. 
If only I could rewind 
to before the 7th of October. 
Before before before. Rewind 
the government, rewind whoever wasn’t paying
enough attention to what was going on 
for so long. I would rewind all the bombing,
every death, every moment 
of suffering. But the days, they refuse 
to go backwards. We are at some hundreds of them
in this war, and so, so many before that.
It’s impossible to count. 
Our son has math homework, he needs a new backpack 
and shoes. Go shopping. 
Keep the house organized for war, so 
just in case, buy flashlights.
I know full well that in this 
we are the lucky ones. 

III.

Sometimes I read poems 
that offer brief solace.
But even poems, for the first time 
in my life, are not enough. 
Even Walt Whitman, my Walt Whitman,
is not quite enough, even the poem 
that Ed read from that time from afar, 
In the freshness the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits and 
vistas again to peace restored.
Such a beautiful line from “To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod,” 
yet peace is so far from restored. 
The faces of the hostages are up, always up 
near the supermarkets. The war 
keeps getting worse. Every time you think 
it can’t, it does. About that everyone 
seems to agree. Hersh, Ori, Eden, Almog, Alexander, Carmel –
you have no idea how hard I prayed 
for you to come home. The day we heard 
it was the height of summer. Remember 
how it rained as if the sky, too, was suffering? The sky 
must know that we are all suffering.
Suffering only leads to suffering. War
only leads to war. I know this. I continue
with the Kaddish – v’yamlich malchutei b’hayeichon u-v’yomeichon,
uv’hayei d’chol beit yisrael.
Every chance I get, I vote against 
the right-wing government. In the two countries
in which I am allowed, I vote and vote.

IV. 

My life: split 
down the middle between 
here and there, somehow never 
anywhere. I vote. 
I protest, as do many. Thousands. Hundreds 
of thousands, flooding the streets.
There seem to be too many who want 
war. My son – I try to reassure him. 
We will be okay. Put your seatbelt on. 
We’re driving to school. I drive 
and continue to say the Kaddish in my mind, like 
when I was a little girl in synagogue, 
in a Friday night service in that small temple, 
next to my father before 
he too left the world – 
ba-agala u-vi-z’man kariv, 
v’imru amen. May this Kaddish 
somehow evoke a hopeless peace.

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Dara Barnat is a scholar of poetry, a poet, and a lecturer
in poetry, creative writing, and academic writing. She holds a Ph.D.
from Tel Aviv University, where she is a senior faculty member
and presently serves as Head of the Division of Languages.

Her scholarly book – Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American 
Poetry – was published in 2023 by the University of Iowa Press
(Iowa Whitman Series). Critical essays on poetry appear or are forthcoming
in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books,
The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, and elsewhere.

Dara is the author of three poetry collections: 
The City I Run From: Poems of Tel Aviv (2020), In the Absence (2016), 
and Headwind Migration (2009). Other poems and translations from Hebrew 
have appeared in The Cortland Review, diode, Poet Lore, 
Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been translated 
into Hebrew, French, and Romanian.

You can get Dara’s most recent book of poems here

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Delights!

Five Tiny Delights

Conversations with my son;

Reading Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (any edition);

Listening to the Canadian band Walk off the Earth;

Chats with students;

The view all the way to the sea from the Tel Aviv University campus

Five Tiny Jewish Delights

Hosting every night during Hanukkah;

Lighting my grandmother’s menorah (may her memory be a blessing);

Learning how to make latkes;

Reading Jewish activist poets, like Muriel Rukeyser;

The calm of Shabbat