How do we stay human?

Sometimes context helps and sometimes it doesn’t. People are bombed, starved or displaced in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine and countless other parts of the world. People celebrating the first day of Chanukah are gunned down on Bondi Beach.

When acts of terrorism - state-orchestrated or otherwise - are covered in the headlines (if they are even covered), the rush to stake out territory for an opinion is often dizzying. It becomes its own machine, lamenting or furious, condemnatory or portentous. Comment after comment, reaction then counter-reaction, click by click, until everyone is sadder and angrier, and no one is wiser.

Sometimes we choke the space we need to mourn. I’m thinking first of those who endure the most terrible personal loss from the daily roll call of atrocities. But I can’t help also wondering if those of us who have privilege of being more distant should pause for longer, to remember the dead we did not know. There is a time for rage, for campaigning and protesting. But grieving must come first. For lives singular and precious to themselves, as Erica Hesketh reminds us in Carousel.

Many of the poems we selected for our edition on conflict are poems of mourning. In loss we look for meaning, and often we find it in the shifts and changes in the natural world – whether on a coastal path, or in a patch of nettles or a company of gannets. Both Glyn Maxwell’s poems, from his Extinction Songs series, deal even more directly with the loss of the many hundreds of species we do not deem worthy of protection.

Others like Jacqueline Saphra’s poised and harrowing reclamation of Muriel Rukeyser’s Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars), and Ben Verinder’s I bring bombs into my house deftly depict our daily torment of reading the news holding our breath. Or turning away, unable to exhale.

And some consider language directly – the unstoppable binary of our algorithm-driven world in the case of Mirkka Jokelainen’s Man or Bear. Or both literarily and physically in Katrina Moinet’s poem, which considers the perpetual issue of how women’s bodies are defined and claimed (with deadly consequences in the case of the erosion of reproductive rights in many countries), and the importance of reclamation.

I hope you spend time in these poems. They are worth stopping for, and necessary in a world, to steal JLM Morton’s words, where to love is no longer enough. In the meantime, we grieve, we write, we stay human.

Sarah Gibbons