This is poetry moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
This week, Lebanon celebrates their Independence Day, amid the current conflict with Israel. November 22nd commemorates the 1943 emancipation from the French Mandate, which ended 23 years of rule. In the past, there were parades, cultural events, and, yes, fireworks.
More meditative than celebratory, today’s poem acknowledges a different military conflict. “In Lebanon, 2000 June,” Angele Ellis considers the ruins of war, the aftermath of the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and her own privileged American citizenship.
Angele Ellis is author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems on her Lebanese heritage won a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; Spared (A Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook), and Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (Six Gallery), a fiction and poetry collection inspired by Angele’s adopted city of Pittsburgh.
During June 2000, with American passport in hand, poet Angele Ellis traveled from checkpoint to checkpoint in Lebanon, the land of her ancestors. As with most wars, although the troops had withdrawn, pain and destruction had remained.
Here’s “In Lebanon, 2000 June” by Angele Ellis
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It was the summer the Israelis withdrew, leaving behind
a landmined no-man's-land of phosphorus orange groves,
blighted with white like the kingdom of the Snow Queen.
We shuddered with each jolt of the road, despite our driver’s
ancestral insouciance: This route has been cleared.
We stopped and showed our papers at every checkpoint,
Lebanese Army, Syrian Army, Hezbollah . . .
The closer we came to the border with Israel, the more
I closed the valves of my attention. I envisioned
the Crusader castle at Sidon—its riot of orange
daylilies—becoming flaming spirits of the dead,
silently screaming in the village wreckage of Qana.
The UN soldiers at the cinderblock outpost were kind.
We showed our papers, and exchanged chipper smiles
as we approached the barbed wire of Palestine. Daddy
pitched his scooped bit of rubble through the chain links—
as Edward Said had done—but I kept mine clenched
inside my palm until it broke the slippery skin.
A shard lodged in the privilege of my American passport.
Another pierced my damaged heart—surging
in cardiac panic at the helplessness of history.
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First published in the poetry anthology Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag)
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That was “In Lebanon, 2000 June” by Angele Ellis. Thanks for listening
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
