
Culture & Community | Faith & Spirituality | Poetry | Arts & Culture | Westville | Palestine Museum U.S. | Arts & Anti-racism | West Rock
Michelle Phương Hồ, pictured at top left: “This is not actually a call to action, but a call to feel." Lucy Gellman Photos.
Karis Ryu crouched low to the ground, bending until she was eye-to-eye with an empty black swing. It hung still in the thick, humid air, waiting for its next pint-sized occupant. She cupped her palms around a heap of sand, then opened them just slightly, letting it pour from where her hands touched. Around her, a chorus of children’s voices filled the air: improvised songs on the nearby swings, contagious mid-tag giggles, joyful shrieks upon discovering the slide.
That tension permeated the West Rock Playground earlier this month, as close to two dozen New Haveners attended “Roses for Gaza,” a liturgy from poet Michelle Phương Hồ with the support of Antonius-Tín Bui, Dani D’Oliveira, Judah Lopez, Faisal Saleh, and the Elm City Vineyard nonviolence group led by Josh Williams and Kim Espinal. Organized nine months into the Israel-Hamas war—the same amount of time it takes to gestate and birth a child—the event became a space not only to grieve the very human toll of war but also to feel deeply, and in so doing find a way forward.
Since Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2023 attacks and Israel’s retaliatory, indiscriminate bombing campaign, nearly 40,000 people have died in Gaza and 576 have died in the occupied West Bank, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Of those, over 15,000 have been children. In that time, the Israeli government has reported that 1,139 Israelis have died and at least 8,730 have been injured. In Gaza, almost two million people have been displaced, according to the United Nations.
Karis Ryu and Tina Colón Williams.
“This is not actually a call to action, but a call to feel,” said Hồ, who lives in the city’s Beaver Hills neighborhood with her husband and young son. In front of her, several woven baskets held 12,756 petals, to represent the number of known women and children in Gaza lost to the war. She explained that the toll is likely much higher. “We were never meant to fathom this scale of loss … It exceeds language.”
As attendees gathered by the West River, Hồ acknowledged a need to feel deeply, as alive in the cries, hushed discussions and impromptu embraces of participants as it was in the writings, scripture, song and poetry that she had selected for the event. Playing attendees in with Benjamin Hastings’ “So Will I,” Elm City Vineyard’s Tina Colón Williams raised her voice to the sky, letting the words wash over the group.
God of Your promise/You don't speak in vain, no syllable empty or void, she began, and people who knew the lyrics joined in. For once You have spoken/All nature and science, follow the sound of Your voice--
Nearby, her children played by the West River, where a bridge connects a shaded grove of trees to a public playground. Slowly, attendees made their way over to it, taking a moment by the rushing, sun-dappled stream, the water whispering as it slipped over the rocks. When the liturgy’s call-and-response began, parts of it felt as if they were written with young people in mind.
“We have ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ but no word for children who die before their mothers,” Hồ read. Unspoken were the stories coming out of Gaza that have become omnipresent: mothers and babies killed in the midst of breastfeeding, mothers who have stopped producing milk because they are starving, people who face giving birth in tents, without access to anesthesia and emergency medical care.
“We don’t know how to hold this,” attendees responded, some already chewing their lips to keep from crying. Ellen Rubin, a nurse practitioner in psychiatry, arrived late on her bike, taking a moment to embrace her friends before taking a program and following along. Minutes later, her face had crumpled as she continued to read.
“We were never meant to behold this,” she responded, reflecting on the sheer scale of loss. She remembered the bombing of a displaced persons camp in Rafah in late May, an attack that joined bombings of schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. She motioned to a sturdy bucket of sand from which attendees could take a handful, hold it for a moment, and place beneath the playground’s empty swings.
As they began to move, sand heaped in their palms, even the wind seemed to hold on to the words from a mother’s testimony of that night in Rafah. I found my six children that couldn’t fit in the tent, labor and delivery nurse Asha Evans had read moments before. They burnt and became ash. I carried the six in my arms as if it were a handful of sand. I continued hugging and kissing them. My six-children world, they became a handful of sand.
Saleh, who is the founder and director of the Palestine Museum U.S. in Woodbridge.
As he studied the sand, snapping photographs of the group, Palestine Museum U.S. Founder Faisal Saleh thumbed through the liturgy, stopping on the cover image. Since October, he has been in near daily contact with artists from Gaza, keeping tabs on many of them and their families as they face displacement, mass death, famine and illness. He stayed in touch with artist Fayez Elhassani, whose painting The Farewell doubled as the liturgy’s cover image.
When they last connected, “he answered and he didn’t sound so good,” Saleh said. After sustaining an injury in Khan Yunis, Elhassani was ultimately able to leave Gaza, one of relatively few Palestenians to be able to do so.
Back on the grass, attendees gathered before seven baskets of petals, each of them luminous in the evening’s golden light. Pausing to honor the thousands of civilians killed, Hồ described a death toll that continues to grow and is likely much higher, bodies incinerated, blown to pieces, and buried beneath heaps of rubble as bombs continue to fall.
”How do we count the cost of war?” She read. “As we gather these petals into our hands and scatter them on the playground, we mourn not just these lives, but our numbness—inability to feel or hold this magnitude of loss.”
Antonius-Tín Bui.
“We mourn the loss of these sacred lives and uncounted others—all children of God— who lie dead under rubble or in mass graves, and not in their families’ arms,” attendees responded, their voices soft and sometimes subdued. “We mourn that in Gaza, sites of refuge and play are now sites of destruction and death.”
Above the well of grief in her voice, another sound took over: children playing, in those warm, fleeting hours just before bedtime. A little girl cried with delight as she went down the slide, her entire face a smile. Tiny feet padded softly, quickly across the woodchips. Hồ’s son wiggled in her husband’s arms, still discovering what his small legs could do.
The words to “Is He Worthy?” floated over the group, Ryu and Colón Williams in sync with each other, and it was as if a dam had finally broken: a few people stepped back, crying quietly as tears rolled down their faces. Slowly, petals began to blanket the grass in red, falling from palm to ground in a delicate, elegiac kind of ballet. Eventually, they will live at the Palestine Museum in Woodbridge, where an exhibition is dedicated to artists from Gaza.
As she lifted petals one by one from the grass, attendee Takeira Bell (with ripped jeans) said that she was grateful for the space to grieve, which she’d heard about through a colleague at Common Ground High School. As a New Havener watching a war thousands of miles away, “I feel the sadness of it all,” she said.
Before ending the night with poetry and prayer, Hồ encouraged attendees to keep just a few petals for themselves, and to share them with those who may not be in agreement over the war, or over conflict right here at home in New Haven. In the packet she had passed out, the words of Palestinian poets Fady Joudah, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat and Refaat Alareer waited patiently to close out the evening.
“We demand each other’s loyalties, yet we cut off our kin,” she read. “We turn our back on our neighbors. We forget the orphan, the widow, the hungry, the migrant, the refugee, the prisoner, and the poor.”
Saleh, who had been standing to the side, joined the group with a vocal arrangement of Alareer’s “If I Must Die,” written weeks before the poet was killed in an airstrike in Northern Gaza last December. Pulling it up on his cell phone, he asked attendees to come in close, as if they were receiving a benediction delivered only in whispers.
The composition came to Saleh through Reem Kelani, a British-Palestinian musician living in London. As the words swelled and strained against Kelani’s piano, people leaned in, listening to every word. Let it be a tale, Kelani repeated, and the piano swirled around her voice until it had swallowed up the words.
“I’m not really okay,” Saleh said later, as a spread from Havenly appeared on nearby picnic tables, and attendees sat to break bread together. “After a while, you get numb. What gets me is the scenes you see on social media, like the kids with their pots and pans. How are the people that are responsible for that feeling?”
Nearby, Hồ said the evening had felt like both a necessity and a catharsis. The child of Vietnamese Boat People, refugees who fled their home after the Vietnam War, she knows intimately what it is to live in the shadow of conflict, colonialism, forced migration and displacement.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, she was also pregnant, and preparing to bring a new life into a world upturned by violence.
“I remember feeling inundated with demands,” she said. She had deep grief, and didn’t know where or how to express it. “I felt like I was missing a step to that place which was lament.”
In the weeks and months that followed, she found herself trying to absorb everything that was happening in Gaza as she gave birth and learned how to parent—itself a life event that can be as destabilizing as it is new and joyful. She recognized the need to gather communally and began writing the liturgy, weaving in scripture, song and poetry.
“I was literally holding new life and watching the desecration of life,” she said. “I think my soul longed for a space that could teach me how to hold that.”
She added that the liturgy was inspired by a monthly service that Elm City Vineyard holds at the nearby New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing on Valley Street, to remember those lost to gun violence in New Haven.
West Rock Park, which sits on unceded Quinnipiac and Wappinger land, is also a meaningful site for New Haveners:most afternoons, a mix of parents, kids, hikers and Westville neighbors cross over the West River into the adjoining park, filling its playground with joyful noise until sunset.
It has also become home to multiple tashlich rituals, in which Jews cast off their sins during the high holidays.In recent years, both Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel (BEKI) and Mending Minyan have used sections of the river to complete their rituals.
Now, it is also touched by the enormity of violence in Gaza, and the regional trauma that has existed and will endure for generations. Hồ explained that that was part of the point when scattering petals, some of which remained in the grass and on the playground even as attendees stayed to gather them back into the baskets.
“It’s one way to touch that unspeakable loss,” she said.