It feels no accident that when peoples experience collective catastrophes—Nakba, Holocaust, and other genocides—it can take years or decades before writers adequately, much less poignantly, can find words that speak to the enormity, the profundity, the bottomless pit of grief. Words that become literary touchstones because their artistry somehow grasps the whole in a way that never forgets the countless shattered pieces that were lives and cultures.

Now we have the internet. Where even when all we have is wordless horror, and pain in our hearts, we feel compelled to try to formulate sentences and slogans, words as sticks and stones that mostly hurt, including ourselves. Words that fall so far—yearning, but not yet able, to journey from rivers to seas—from what any human body can process in such a short, relentless, bloodlust time.

We leap to language, even as we feel emptied out of poetry. We skip over what our pounding chest and aching gut and sleepless nights are telling us. We forget to look into eyes, forget to read body language, forget to listen to our body.

What might not-words better tell us?

We might remember that we’re feeling and reacting, mourning and fighting, from deep wells of epigenetic and ancestral trauma, and equally deep wells of rituals of resilience and joy. We might drink from those wells to find nourishment in shared solidarities that have fed us over millennia, just as we dispossessed and diasporic peoples—who’ve long cursed popes and kings, empires and states, prisons and walls, and so much more that divide and destroy us—shared foods and symbols that knew no nation, from the healing balm of olive oil and comforting shade of olive trees, to the luscious seeds of pomegranates and open hand of the hamsa.

We might look up at the same crescent moon, from one place that’s not being pummeled to another that’s getting no respite, and hope its blessed light not only connects us but also guides us to find better and better ways to love, defend, and protect each other. Ways that defy and smash borders. Ways that don’t merely cease bombs but instead seize liberation and freedom.

(photo: closeup of a banner—honing in on a painting of a pomegranate—from a Public Mourner’s Kaddish that a group of us rad Jews self-organized and held two days ago in so-called Asheville, NC.)