Once I Thought I Could Save People

Like many American twenty-two-year-olds, I thought I could save the world. Raised outside of Washington, D.C., I attended pro-choice rallies, handed out Mondale-Ferraro campaign stickers, and started a NOW chapter at my high school. In college, I immersed myself in public policy and gender studies classes, and, after graduation, I packed my Geo Prizm with a rolled-up futon and a false sense of confidence.

I didn’t travel far—I moved across town from College Hill to South Providence, sharing a loft with my boyfriend and two artists before it was considered hip to live in a kitchen-less warehouse. While my classmates found jobs on Wall Street or started medical school, I thought I would do the real work: helping children who put the “need” in “needy.”

My first post-college job was as a residential counselor at a group home, a modern-day orphanage for children unable to be placed in foster homes. During my 3:00–11:00 p.m. shift, I picked up a group of eight- to ten-year-old boys from their classrooms, accompanied them to appointments with their social workers, and when they attempted to injure themselves or anyone else, physically restrained them in glassless and furniture-free “safe rooms.” On the first day, the therapist who trained me assured me that an adult using their full weight on a child calmed a child’s emotional dysregulation. We were protecting them, above all, from themselves and each other.

Few shifts would pass without the need for physical restraints. One night while I was restraining a child, my arms outstretched on top of his arms, my belly to his back, his friend attempted to rescue him by jumping on me, almost breaking my elbow. In some ways, this act was heartening—what these boys had for each other was love and resilience.

Once, a coworker warned me to avoid reading the local newspapers since he guaranteed some of these boys’ names would eventually appear in the crime blotter. I believed him, and I wonder now if I purposely forgot their last names. I had read their files describing the repeated abuse and trauma they had faced, and the details were worse than anything suitable for mainstream newspaper reading. I didn’t want to know that the darkness of their past might continue into their futures.

I thought I could change these kids’ lives. But as an adult, although a young one, I was their enemy, the one keeping them from their parents, siblings, and friends. I was the one restraining them at 9:30 p.m. instead of tucking them into their beds.

A year later, I accepted a position as a litigation paralegal. Maybe I could help people from a more emotionally distant, legal place; maybe I could represent foster children or serve as a public defender. Instead, I summarized depositions for tax evasion cases and wrote letters for a corporation that refused to take responsibility for an environmental disaster. My reprieve was hiding in the file room where I started crafting short stories about despondent lawyers.

After hours, I filled out applications for poetry MFA programs on the office typewriter. Two years earlier at Brown, I had taken every available poetry workshop and finished a book-length manuscript of poems. I had promised myself in half-seriousness that if law school didn’t pan out, I would obtain my MFA. Now that I was no longer interested in law school, I thought maybe I could change the world in a different way; maybe poetry was the way, and I could at least enjoy myself in the process.

Back when I was an undergraduate, creative writing professors lauded the Language poetics of Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Michael Palmer, and I was embarrassed by my non-experimental poems that drifted into narrative or even the dreaded confessional. In graduate school, I was taught to avoid politics, and so I wrote poems about my Maryland childhood, failed relationships, and poisonous plants, thanks to a romance with a botanist.

But I wanted my poems to carry weight. In college, I had discovered Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, an anthology of poems about war, military occupation, exile, and political injustices, a text as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1993. Her collection was clear in its message about the need for a historical record of atrocities and poets’ refusal to be silent.

Then one summer at Community of Writers, I met Robert Hass who spoke of his close relationship with Polish American poet Czeslaw Milosz. While reading more of Milosz’s work, which he wrote in Polish and translated into English, I came across his poem entitled “Dedication,” which asks,

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment . . .

Milosz’s words were like a prayer, an anthem, an anchor. Why write a poem if it won’t reverberate not only on the page, but also in a person’s veins? What are we as poets doing with this short, privileged time during which we have a reader’s attention?

I began to write the poems I needed to write: about my grandmothers who were orphaned during the Armenian Genocide and raised in Red Cross orphanages in the Middle East. About Turkey, a country that imprisons its journalists, writers, and academics for recognizing the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, and the Azerbaijan blockade and eventual expulsion of Armenians living in Artsakh in 2023. I write about my father who as a child lived in a vibrant Armenian community in Jerusalem until 1948, when soldiers dynamited his front door and he became a refugee in the West Bank, where he lived without electricity or running water. I write about my father’s toys, so many toys, and wonder which soldier discovered his rocking horse or erector set, wiped off the dust, and brought it to his children to play with. I write about visiting my father’s old schools and grandparents’ graves and the checkpoints through which I was allowed to pass while Palestinians waited and waited and waited. I write about how lucky I was to be questioned by IDF soldiers only twice.

But here’s the truth: my poems aren’t saving anyone. None of my metaphors are quickening the pulse of my elected officials, even in the progressive Bay Area where I live. My stories aren’t preventing my tax dollars from being used to massacre more Gazan children.

Some of these poems are lucky enough to find homes, while others are still knocking at the doors of literary journals. Maybe my pieces are rejected because of their lack of craft, or maybe their political leanings don’t line up with those of the readers, editors, and donors. But why should I care about homes for my poems when Palestinians are losing their actual homes every day? Why should I care when children and women and yes, beautiful and innocent men, are being murdered each day by American bombs?

Then I read the poems of Mosab Abu Toha whose home was destroyed, who was kidnapped and tortured by the IDF. I buy and read the books of fearless Palestinian poets such as George Abraham, Hala Alyan, Mahmoud Darwish, Noor Hindi, National Book Award winner Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Fady Joudah, Nathalie Khankan, Naomi Shihab Nye, and so many others. I do what I can to celebrate those who refuse to be silenced.

Each morning a photo of a child killed in Gaza appears in my news feed; I picture my eight-year-old father covered in white dust being escorted from his house by soldiers. I write daily emails to my representatives and attend ceasefire rallies in San Francisco where I see kites with the late poet Refaat Alareer’s words, “If I must die/you must live/to tell my story.” Yes, poetry still breathes, flies through city streets, and attempts to ignite change. Is it saving children? No, far from it—17,000 children in Gaza have been killed in the last fifteen months and the number continues to grow. My words are not rescuing anyone out of the rubble. But what can be saved? The personal accounts, the past and present voices of Palestinian writers, the poetry of witness. And a commitment to write in the small, imperfect way that I know how while remembering Forché’s words: “poems will not permit us a diseased complacency.”