"Beauty and Violence in Israel"
"Beauty and Violence in Israel"
by Rick Black
Israel is both a beautiful and violent land. I learned that during my six years living there, three of which I spent as a reporter in the Jerusalem bureau of The New York Times. I covered Palestinian demonstrations and the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf war, the arrival of Russian and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants and the founding of new Israeli settlements. I was often struck by the sharp contrasts of the country: Palestinians and Jews, the Negev and the Galilee, ancient and modern. Although I wanted to write about the country in a deeper way, to plumb its paradoxes and contradictions, I was limited by the parameters of the newspaper trade and its vocabulary. I was largely restricted to filing stories about war, demonstrations and terrorist attacks.
In 1992, when I returned to the States, I received a book about haiku—those tiny, imagistic poems that last so briefly but make an abiding impression like a firefly in the night. I loved their short, concise form and non-judgmental approach to the world. I began to read and learn more about haiku. In particular, I was struck by the poems of Nick Virgilio, a haiku poet who used the genre to deal with the death of his youngest brother in Vietnam.
deep in rank grass,
through a bullet-riddled helmet:
an unknown flowerNick Virgilio
Reading Virgilio’s poems, I realized that haiku might help sort out the contradictory emotions that Israel evoked in me. I started to write a lot of haiku and won several awards. When I returned to Israel a few years later, I jotted down some possible poems, thoughts and impressions. I strove to make connections between olive trees and refugee camps, military cemeteries and blossoming rosemary, great blue herons and F-16s in a way that I had always wanted to but was never able to do as a reporter. . . .
