{"id":81148,"date":"2014-12-31T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2014-12-31T14:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81148"},"modified":"2014-12-25T14:54:28","modified_gmt":"2014-12-25T19:54:28","slug":"on-the-slaughter-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/31\/on-the-slaughter-2\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Slaughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out until January 5, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A political poem\u2019s ironic new life.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Bialik_ParisReview<\/a>

Bialik at around age thirty.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

ON THE SLAUGHTER<\/small><\/p>\n

Heaven\u2014have mercy.
If you hold a God
(to whom there\u2019s a path
that I haven\u2019t found), pray for me.
My heart has died.
There is no prayer on my lips.
My hope and strength are gone.
How long? How much longer?<\/p>\n

Executioner, here\u2019s my neck:
Slaughter! You\u2019ve got the ax and the arm.
The world to me is a butcher-block\u2014
we, whose numbers are small
it\u2019s open season on our blood:
Crack a skull\u2014let the blood
of infant and elder spurt on your chest,
and let it remain there forever, and ever.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s justice\u2014let it come now!
But if it should come after I\u2019ve been
blotted out beneath the sky,
let its throne be cast down.
Let the heavens rot in evil everlasting,
and you, with your cruelty,
go in your iniquity
and live and bathe in your blood.<\/p>\n

And cursed be he who cries out: Revenge!
Vengeance like this, for the blood of a child,
Satan has yet to devise.
Let the blood fill the abyss!
Let it pierce the blackest depths
and devour the darkness
and eat away and reach
the rotting foundations of the earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Political poems lead strange lives\u2014they often wither on the vines of the events they\u2019re tied to. Old news gives way to new, and the whole undertaking starts to seem, well, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. For many and maybe most American readers, \u201cpoetry and politics just don\u2019t mix.\u201d<\/p>\n

But sometimes they do. Quite violently.<\/p>\n

On June 12, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped while hitchhiking home together from their West Bank yeshivas. They were murdered\u2014most likely within hours of being taken\u2014and, eighteen days later, after an extensive search, their bodies were discovered under some rocks in a field near Hebron. Israel mourned, and raged. Emerging from a cabinet meeting convened just after the corpses were found, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his condolences to the families and quoted the great modernist Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik: \u201cVengeance \u2026 for the blood of a small child, \/ Satan has not yet created.\u201d He went on in his own words: \u201cHamas is responsible\u2014and Hamas will pay.\u201d For good measure, the Prime Minister\u2019s office tweeted the lines as well.<\/p>\n

As anyone who hasn\u2019t lived atop a column in the Congo for the past seven weeks knows, a series of violent, retaliatory acts followed. Israel carried out mass arrests on the West Bank, killing six in the process; a Palestinian teenager was beaten and burned alive by a group of Jews; throngs of Palestinians destroyed tracks and stations on the Jerusalem light-rail line; Jewish gangs shouting \u201cDeath to the Arabs!\u201d rampaged through Jerusalem in search of victims\u2014and found them; some thirty-five thousand Facebook users \u201cliked\u201d a page called \u201cThe People of Israel Demand Revenge\u201d; Hamas fired rockets by the dozen into Israel from Gaza; Hamas officials warned that \u201cthe gates of hell\u201d would open if Israel attacked in retaliation for the killings or the shelling. Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out until January 5, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year! * A political poem\u2019s ironic new life. ON THE SLAUGHTER Heaven\u2014have mercy.If you hold a God(to whom there\u2019s a paththat I haven\u2019t found), pray for me.My heart has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":730,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16464],"tags":[14803,14802,7316,583,14805,582,7221,165,14804,2426],"class_list":["post-81148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2014","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-hayim-nahman-bialik","tag-hebrew","tag-israel","tag-operation-protective-edge","tag-palestine","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-political-poems","tag-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn the Slaughter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Peter Cole on Hayim Nahman Bialik\u2019s political poem\u2019s ironic new life.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/31\/on-the-slaughter-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On the Slaughter by Peter Cole\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 31, 2014 \u2013 We\u2019re out until January 5, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we\u2019re away. 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