Here's a poem I wrote after attending a demonstration on April 17, 2025, at the Northwest Correctional Center in St. Albans, Vermont, to call for the release of unlawfully detained Columbia University grad student Mohsen Mahdawi.
Distant across the dun, gently rolling
hay field stretches the long, low
prison complex, standing proud and untouchable
as a scab on a knee
scraped and skinned when we stumbled.
This narrow road has skinny shoulders.
Drainage ditches close by each side
give it a slightly elevated feel,
a causeway through last fall's stubble.
When I come over the rise,
see at least a hundred cars
parked beside the road, leaning slightly
into the ditch, and the trickle
of johnny-come-latelies purposefully walking
with hand lettered, cardboard signs through
raw wind and driving snow - as
miserable a day as this month
could summon, ironic in its cruelty
towards us denouncing cruelty - and see
the knot of hardy souls, several
hundred strong, towards whom we tend,
who've gathered already at the prison's
driveway's unmarked and unremarkable mouth,
under a copse of Palestinian banners,
having answered a call first issued
only yesterday, my first thought is,
I love Vermont. I want to
live nowhere, ever, other than here.
But half an hour later, the
green, white, and black flags have
found their voice, and into the
vastly vacant fields fling the chant
Pal-es-tine. Will be free.
From the river. To the sea.
My fingers ache with cold, clutching
against the shoving wind the stick
to which I've affixed another stick
on which I've lettered "Free Mahdawi."
I think, THAT'S hard for me
to hear: "freedom from" is so
close to "free of"; I was
born just seven years after the
world experienced a most awful emptiness;
I was enjoined never to forget;
in that void was forged the
heart of a nation that claims
me for its own, ALTHOUGH I've
never lived there, nor wanted to;
my grandparents fled here, not there;
before my birth they brought me
under the Statue of Liberty's torch.
BUT Mohsen, whose name I carry,
hails from there; here, he's jailed
for pleading, here, to end the
bloody havoc innocent people suffer there.
I feel as distant from that
country, turned vicious in its pain,
where nobody's safe, as I do,
this moment, from this, separated
from both by razor wire, suddenly
homeless here, among a homeless tribe.
