Alice Walker wrote a poem on the US Boat. It’s at this link, at Facebook, and includes these lines:
That a boat
filled
with love letters
from children
is a threat
to those
with
apparently
little memory
of youth
or experience
of love.
And it is introduced with this note:
Today is, I think, the 31st of June (Friday?) or is it the1st of July?
We have been in Athens since the 21st – trying to get to Gaza. Many impediments orchestrated by the Israeli government. But what a wonderful group of humans.
Therefore: We’ve won. We’re in Gaza. To be in Gaza is to feel this love. To know there is always a part of humanity that is awake even though the overburdened or the bewitched remain sleeping.
My throat is sore from breathing the tear gas that drifted into our hotel windows, as Greeks, mostly young, battle police, their brothers and sisters who are paid to keep them in line. This is the tragedy. I feel so much compassion for both sides my eyes tear and not only from the gas.
It was hard to breathe. My lungs were fighting hard to protect me. How I adore them, my lungs. And so many of our group tried to protect us, my lungs and me, too. A lovely young man named Steve gave me his own gas mask and someone else, a beautiful young woman with straw colored hair and blue gray eyes gave me the benefit of her knowledge of how to wear it.
I do not like calling such angels “blonde” as I feel the word is so loaded now and it sets them outside of Nature and somehow diminishes them.
I spent a blissful hour yesterday massaging Hedy’s feet. She has the most wonderful gray eyes – full of humor and light. She’d never had a foot massage before, she said. And she is eighty-seven! Hard to imagine.
Hedy, I said – when she told everyone who passed by us: “I’m being spoiled” – I have a full body massage at least once a week!
This was a high point for me, as it is well established by now in myself and among my friends, that I like to massage the feet of anyone who stands up for us. Humanity, I mean.
Or the other animals.
Hedy, holocaust survivor, inhaling the gas in Greece, but even more poignant, anticipating being tear gassed by the Israelis who are doing everything they can to threaten our boat.
I have no computer – they said not to bring one on the boat because it would likely by destroyed or confiscated – only this small notebook in which I have been avoiding writing the poem that starts and stops in my head:
