About a month ago the writer Michele Chabin sent me a poem: the first poem she had written in thirty years. When I read the poem (below) I thought that with the turmoil of ICE raids in the USA and the instability in The Middle East, perhaps I could build a folio around the subject “In A Time Of War.” Little did I realize when I put out the submission call that not only would a war break out while I was working on the folio (more about this in the second half of this folio next week), but, more importantly, that the subject would rouse a response from poets all over the world. We received over 100 submissions from across the globe, as far as Australia, from Africa, from India, from the USA and Israel. Yes, the world is more dangerous today than ever, but what the poets in these pages have taught me is that war is ubiquitous in all countries and throughout history.
And they taught me something else. Last July I started this journal because I wanted to create a space where poets could join together. My friend Joanna Chen suggested the name “Calul” which is Hebrew for inclusive. I never felt this inclusivity more than when I started reading the submissions for this folio. War affects every community in every culture. And everywhere there is war, suffering, poverty, displacement and death follow. I am sad that it took this subject to bring to Calul’s pages the thing it was created for: the kind of singular human voice that is so often the byproduct of poetry. Poetry should always be the bridge that joins us. It should do the thing the poets and the poems below do: allow us to experience each other’s humanity, to share in it, and to work for a better world within the stories we share.
This is the first installment of In A Time Of War. Please look for part two on Sunday, March 8th. Until then, stay safe—everyone—everywhere.
Once Again Again. I went to the supermarket this morning to stock up on bottled water and canned goods and yahrzeit memorial candles. Just in case. Then to the hardware store for an extra flashlight and batteries. Again. Just in case. Also – to be on the safe side – I bought a string of lavender and baby blue solar lights, the kind we hang in the Sukkah. Because you never know. Last month, as you always do, you said: Mom, don’t worry. If something serious is about to happen I’ll get called up. But you weren’t called up, and there was no war, and I slept through the night. I mean that war. There is still war. Just not that war. Yesterday you called me. I was on the bus, headed home from the shuk, grocery bags hanging from my wrists. I fumbled through my purse, in search of my phone. I’ve been called up, you said in your usual calm, unflappable voice. My entire unit has been called up. What? When? Just now. When are you leaving? As soon as I can. Once again you asked me to help you find your old, worn army socks. I asked if you had packed your toothbrush, shampoo, Flip Flops, and warm undershirts. As if I was sending you off to summer camp and not an army base. Like so many times before. I handed you some headache pills and Band Aids. Just in case. So now the mamad, the safe room – okay, the bomb shelter! – that doubles as your bedroom, is ready. Just in case. If. When. The sirens start wailing. Again. —by Michele Chabin, a native New Yorker who now lives in Jerusalem
Broken World
Life goes on.
I get up in the morning.
Get dressed. Drink coffee.
Check messages delivered in the dead of night.
Messages I already read in the agony of dawn.
Awakened by airplanes thundering overhead,
By booms and thuds and counting of the dead.
Headlines, analyses, breaking news.
Life goes on, like I said.
People die, are killed,
It is to be expected, a thousand miles away
They perish, thirty miles away
They perish, there are already too many
To count. But do you know that my moon is
Their moon, do you see it rising? The missile
Falling? Keep it in your sights. Hear it
Ripping through the air, midflight.
You send me love, you add a hug,
You assure me you’re praying hard
In between everything else.
But prayer cannot fix this -
The sky splitting open
Between one breath and the next.
—by Joanna Chen, originally from Great Britain, she lives now in the Ella Valley
The Empty Villages
We found warm food on tables.
We found embers.
We found clothes strewn.
Fields missing a farmer.
Sheep without a shepherd.
But we did not know the ghosts.
They were not related
And we were without
A home. We moved in—
A pile of fishbones baking
Faster in the sunny backyard
Than the pile could rot.
An abandoned cloth doll.
I plowed their land.
Harvested their groves.
Found strands of their hair
Black and brown, silver and gold.
Every day I woke
In that house, living
Someone else’s life
Instead of dying.
—by Chivas Sandage, originally from Arkansas she now she splits her time between rural Northwestern Connecticut and San Marcos, Texas
BENUE: The Food Basket or Blood Basket of the Nation.? Pope Leo XIV comdenmed the killing of 200 people burnt alive in their IDP Camp, homes by herders in Benue State, Nigeria. Where the government of the day is silent, inaction. —Vatican News The city that once lit up her censer, Gracing the nose of her travellers with an aura— Spirituality amongst the ancient inhabitants. Here, too, must be the city of God, until yesterday, When the hands of herders, blind government Lit up bones of the people unto their gods. Greed, no empathy, lynched them in shades, Shadows as burnt offerings unto what I don’t know. As the travellers look for the city, they know what And where their fates are before the gods lie. Do their goddesses ordain cows to outlive men? Here, the city of Yelwata will know what an inferno does To the tender bodies, two hundred altar-lambs, Slaughtered in one night’s unblinking dark— One night's toll, and the government never said a word. Because it’s their way of silencing our voices, I mean, their way of equating us to burnt offerings. But our voices were heard over the Holy See, In many languages, humanity heard: that one night, Benue was laid in waste, and the fire’s fangs Gnawed through our doors, exhaling us home in smoke. —by John Chinaka Onyeche, a Nigerian writer based in Port Harcourt
The Body Is the First Border
Their narrative “Border is just a line in the map”
but you know the first border was imprinted on my skin;
scrutinized, frisked and labelled ‘illegal’
long before I learnt the so-called fear grammar.
The first war never arrived with tanks.
It arrived with nerve-wrecking sirens.
With a question carefully asked for twice.
With a gun casually dwindling
on a hip that was familiar with my name
before I uttered it.
Somewhere a strategy tucked for general studies;
here, a child is fed with sirens.
Somewhere we see an ironed flag;
here, a mother weeps, irons fresh blood
out of a wet shirt she will never get to throw away.
Do you know how heinousness prepares?
It teaches the body to tremble, to flinch, to collapse
before a thought shoots the mind.
It turns sleep into a tiny audition for death.
It teaches the heart to beat in palpitations.
As if it is already racing. We tag it ‘security’.
We name it ‘defence.’ But this body knows!
When safety is just a war
dressed in a clean uniform.
—by Suchismita Ghoshal, a poet from West Bengal, India
Disappearing in History 1. the bombs fall again. As always the beginning & the end transpose in the middle. The rubble of houses religiously dusted Mondays, swept Wednesdays & cursed Fridays withstands all translation. Walls open. Windows won’t close. Infinity slips through broken homes of smoke & bones, grandmothers’ invisible skin glowing, fathers’ shadow eyes flickering blue in this village of ghosts who will not be spoken to. Where spells cannot be sung & bloodsongs cannot be unsung, bodies can no longer thirst & cannot grow wings, bells won’t ring, clocks can’t change, bones cannot unbreak & fists cannot unclench. In this village where they speak with the dead, conversations begin at the end 2. mourning Dmytro, they say whatever’s left of his bones may splinter into stars somewhere it may turn out he knows how to fly. All the bombs can do is fall 3. fleeing with his mother, a 7-year old boy stares silently out a car window, fading in the blessed unrest, in an unsharpened pencil on a desk, in newspapers flying from a waste bin past boundaries engraved on bodies, in morning rain & the coming fog of night, in light losing itself in a young soldier’s eyes, in fingers typing treaties, whereas, heretofore, in consideration of inaudible announcements of arrivals & departures, in the boarded-up path to the border, past a silently rotting house & the fenced-off road beyond, in children waving to each car driving by, in the old woman digging in her bags for everything she’s lost: her garden, both sons, her home. —by rose auslander is a poet from Hyannis, Massachusetts
The Search
In the killing zone
where the red string of fate
stretches into infinity
I search for you,
search for any part of you
but find none.
I search
and I search.
I search again but find nothing
nothing remains
where the red string of fate was stretched
out
into invisible infinity
I still search.
—Lynn White, a poet from North Wales
POEM 2: Even My Toddlers Knows How to Sing “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” (after Tears For Fears) i. Taipei, 2024 Turbulences trolled our flight | Back to another troubling term | Flight entertainment taught me | The tragedy of 12.12: The Day 1979 | South Korean Coup d’e’ tat | December Twelfth Civilians betrayed | Fourth Republic of Korea | Revolving military regime A lone Commander Jang Tae-wan | Stood | Against the Hanahoe coup military instigators: “You god damn rebels! Do not move and stay there! I will drive a tank right now and blow your heads away!” Must teach Son | Courage | “勇” ii. Brisbane, 1989 Orbiting to another lifetime, another galaxy | Before Son and Husband | Swallowed half of me Nine-year old me | Stared at tv images, newspaper photos | Tanks and students | Tiananmen Square A lone protestor | Waved his shopping bag | Against the tanks | Two shadows | Whisked this Tank Man away Wang Weilin (“王维林” ) | Was that really you? | Are you okay? Father taught | Will | “志” iii. Seattle, 2024 My toddler playfully smashed | His Hot Wheel cars against his Lego figurines | He gleefully toyed with the Roku stick |“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” started to play | As I guiltily glanced away to my Apple news feed | South Korean President Yoon | Declared | Martial Law. These treacherous detours | From the distant democracy These Ogres | Demons | Dictators They | Never | Left. Must teach Son | Peace | “和平” —by Amy Lee is a poet and a lawyer based in Seattle, Washington
May Blossom in Helmand
I stop near a vein of bluebells.
as if May’s petrol-sky had pooled
into this grape and grain honeyed perfume.
Shotguns blast the tree line and village bells peal.
Burring insects fill lime-frilled blossom.
A red tractor, trailed by gulls, churns loamy earth,
three deer bound the field’s barbed perimeter.
A world from the crackling filter of his voice.
Patrolling sun-scorched, willow-fringed channels,
wading chest-deep in silt from the frozen heart of Hindu Kush.
My son skirts ambushes in salt-cedar and wormwood,
flushing out whisperers, grubbing wires underground.
He took a piss behind a wall’s melting mid-day shadows.
His watch stopped at the blast beyond. Doves lifted, goats scattered.
He jumped the suicide bomber’s head to his three men,
pooled in blood and focussed on the bloom of their fixed pupils.
Plunged in morphine, packed gushing wounds,
tracking for faintest pulse or breath.
A swarm of flies honed in
to the hot iron-tang of butchery.
Under this rain-cooled canopy, I weep,
knowing he risks his life for nothing that will change.
His letters on blue paper scrawled in a candlelit compound
and read in this violet wood.
—by MJ Greenwood, a poet and novelist based in Bristol, born in Liverpool and of Irish descent. 
War Language "poetry is not merely a description of an event; it is an event." —Ilya Kaminsky The threat is not speaking Russian but watching the tanks lay down rough tracks in Ukraine. Already, they've chewed up the borders of Kharkiv, spit on the words from the City of Poets. Every bullet becomes another man's eye, every mortar one more crushing blow to the head, no body with the time to argue one side before the other. There are shoes in the streets of Kharkiv, feet herding to shelter, children in pink snow suits handed off to strangers for safekeeping, the speech of goodbye tears breaking the silence that follows the shelling. Occupied and occupier cleave the meaning of war in Kharkiv, break it down into fragments of sound — one, the whistles of rockets; one, the louder testimony of loss. —by Maureen Doallas, a native of Arlington, Virginia, currently lives in Canton, Ohio
Sirens Without a Map
Tonight the sirens do not ask
which language you pray in.
They swell one long strand of sound--
and join the boroughs in a sew,
into a single listening body.
somewhere a mother makes counts of passports,
birth certificates, photographs.
which do not forget laughter.
Somewhere a child asks
in case morning remains to be entered.
Across the ocean, another sky
flares with arguments of fire,
and leaders hold forth in ranges,
too large for grief to cross.
Yet inside a basement
foreigners hand bread over bread,
like a quiet treaty.
No anthem is sung.
No history agrees on them.
Still—
somebody fills cups with tea that are chippy,
someone says stay,
somebody says that we will ride it out.
And for a moment
the world is not secluded by boundaries,
but by the simple refusal
to abandon one another.
—by Abraham Aondoana, is a writer from Nigeria
Cover the Earth
I haven’t taken a deep breath in days, possibly weeks. My piss is turning gold. The decal on the paint store window says COVER THE EARTH. Sahara. Mustard. Bronze. Chipped from nowhere. Shipped everywhere. Blam. Not that everyone isn’t ordering drones. If only there was a gate to stand outside. Oh, for Larkin’s empty sky. But there’s only a rain of fire coming. The rain that is only for you. Surely this has been described. Surely I can’t describe it. The satellite maps at our fingertips. The charred remains. The laptop’s edge still shiny, like a wing. Whose shape is under investigation. Like all the shapes, and their shadows, in the street view. For we have entered the zeroeth power. That makes one. That makes you. The day you discover your mouth is on fire.
—by Amy Eisner is a poet living in Washington, DC
Enemy For the War in Gaza, October 30, 2023 after Mathew 5:7 Are we not one skin, one breath amid the rubble underneath this sulfur sky? Are my children, their deaths, any more important than yours? Which mother’s tears are less than incense? Whose children does God not weep for in this red and brutal hell? I choose to put down my gun, face my commander’s wrath and stand defenseless before you. Would you do the same? On this killing ground who will plant the first rose? —by William N. Scott is a lifelong resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Joan Mitchell (1925 –1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.
Mitchell’s emotionally intense style and its gestural brushwork were influenced by nineteenth-century post-impressionist painters, particularly Henri Matisse. Memories of landscapes inspired her compositions; she famously told art critic Irving Sandler, “I carry my landscapes around with me.” Her later work was informed and constrained by her declining health.
From Mitchell's artwork to all of these gut-wrenching, beautiful poems this collection is breathtaking. Thank you for assembling it - it is a labor of love and witness. I hope you are safe and well. Sending peace.
This is excellent and exceptional at the same time. How are you able to put these beautiful poems and poets together at the same time, I commend you. Kudos! 💐🎉🎊🔥