WRITING PROMPTS TO BENEFIT CHILDREN IN GAZA
UNICEF reports that in Gaza, “hundreds of thousands of children and families are caught in a catastrophic situation” and that, ongoing as of November 14th 2023, over 4200 children have been killed and more than 7000 have been injured “due to unrelenting attacks”, while over 1300 others are missing. Outlining the charity’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, UNICEF spokesman James Elder explains: “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.” Elder has also called for “children held hostage in Gaza [to] be immediately reunited with their families and loved ones”. Recent updates state that “hundreds of thousands of children … remain trapped in a war zone with little or no access to food, water, electricity, medicine or medical care”.
For the duration of NaNoWriMo, we will be posting a writing prompt every day and in doing so, we are hoping to encourage our community to donate to charities providing medical aid to children in desperate need in this unprecedented crisis.
These prompts have been created by writers from Wales or with a connection to Wales and its magazines and presses. The prompts are on all kinds of subjects, but many are related to anti-violence and the work of empathy, and they are offered with the simple hope that they might encourage people to donate in support of medical aid in Gaza. We include a list of suggested charities to donate to below, highlighting the Appeal to Children in Gaza.
UNICEF “continues to call for an immediate ceasefire as 1.1 million people — nearly half of them children — in northern Gaza have been warned to move out of the way of a widescale military assault, but with nowhere safe for them to go”. Elder concludes: “The humanitarian situation has reached lethal lows, and yet all reports point to further attacks. Compassion – and international law – must prevail.”
DAY 31: LEAH UMANSKY
Survival
The poem “Survival,” by Leah Umansky is a prose poem about gathering hope and wonder to help one survive difficult times. What are the things you to do to muster a sense of hope? What are the ways you find a sense of joy when in times of despair? What other sources, books, movies, etc. help you move forward when you are stuck? Write a prose poem that touches on one of these questions.
Survival by Leah Umansky
My whole life I’ve been the speaker of my poems, but that isn’t really true. My voice came late, sympathetic, like a witness, or a victim. It was a rescuing impulse: the art. We were already groping at each other through the flower-sprayed field of self-discovery. All across this body, I felt I was winning. I felt the harshness of promise conspire with the transformation of story, my story. We all have stories, like the way all states have fear.
This is a feared state, but we must open the doors of our hearts, and let the latches fall. All futures are uncertain. A brave new world is one where doom and sight are equivocal. Look again, this isn’t fiction; we’re living this.
At times, the extraordinary overtakes me. A kiss, a new book, a moment of flattery, laughter or a happy mistake. The dream, the scene of the past, and the present are all encounters like train travel. The moment passes through is before we register the scene, but I want to register this.
I want to remember my hope and my heart. I want to remember the way time skips forward and away, like the stunning sight of bord-wings beating, that stirred fascination, that flutter and art. Yes, I said art, and it is, even in this pacing of life we propel ourselves through.
The wild joy is in the speaking. We must keep speaking. We all in some way depressed, and the undepressed is in the imagining of desertion. The imagining of the next moment, the next day, the next year, like a rift opening. Keep looking. Manipulate that violating. Manipulate the whirl of your anger and meld it to what stirs you.
In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlin tells the young King Arthur, The Wart, that he will someday face all the evil in the world. He says, ‘Learning will never fail you’ and I feel that’s good advice. We are all facing the darkness head-on.
Armor yourself in disruption and creation; that is the way this will end, in a forward slip into story, in taking the best parts of us into a dawning future with art and voice.
(This poem was reprinted from Leah Umansky’s The Barbarous Century (2018).)
Please consider donating to a charity providing medical aid in Gaza. We recommend UNICEF’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, but other charities include:
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
Discover more from Modron Magazine
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Modron Magazine 