A Prayer of Six Wings

A Prayer of Six Wings is an account of the poet Owen Lewis's experience in the year following Hamas's Al-Aqsa Flood Massacre on October 7, 2023. The poems portray the complexity of the grief shared by so many Jews of the diaspora and Israel, for the horror of the events of October 7th, the subsequent war and suffering in Gaza, and the frightening spectre of rising anti-semitism. The collection begins with "My Partisan Grief" and moves toward a shared grief across embattled borders. A number of the poems in the collection are poetic journalism pieces, inspired by newspaper headlines. Others tell the story of his Israeli family and reflect on the grief of all victims of this war, how daily life continues in fraught circumstances, and prayers for peace remain elusive.

"It was a year that leapt from intense moment to intense moment. Poetry, for me, is about emotional intensity, its unique capacity to both convey that intensity as well as complexity of what's experienced. It was a year of "what's happening today," or "what did we sleep through last night," as our fears, hopes, anxieties, rage, and sadness rose and fell by the hour. A year (and it's not really over), is a long time to live on the edge. The challenge was to take these moments and create a longer arc of development that moves from panic and fear to a vision for the future.

In a general sense, what psychiatrists and poets do is listen to language and how it conveys more than the immediate and obvious. As a psychiatrist I watch how people live with intense emotions and what they do to avoid such intensity in order to get on with the everyday. The book attempts to capture both that intensity as well as how the everyday is lived in such circumstances." - Owen Lewis, MD, Professor of Psychiatry in Medical Humanities & Ethics, Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons

A Prayer of Six Wings is an extraordinary book, not for the ideological but for the intellectually and emotionally engaged, and for lovers of poetry and truth. In the prophet Isaiah's vision, the seraphim attending God's throne possess six wings: two to cover the face, two the feet (possibly implying genitals), two to fly. In this study of trauma, born from the Israel-Gaza War, the poet's ego and personal history are, like an angel's, modestly underplayed. After reading in the New York Times of "Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7," he notes of himself and his wife, "For weeks after, we avoid sex." The poet has a spritely granddaughter named Noa, and when he watches a video of a young woman named Noa violently taken captive by Hamas, we understand these are all our children. The poems travel between America and Israel, between the man tearing down posters of hostages in New York City and the "vast and unforgiving desert" where "there are not pebbles enough" to place on the twelve hundred graves, and a midrashic sky in which God "couldn't possibly hold all the dead children...and the closer he drew them in, the more He cried." These poems are very Jewish, but fly beyond the enmity of Jews and Palestinians to a deeper sense of "these my sons, these my cousins." When will there be healing? Is there comfort in distance? "Forty years, my friend. Our grandchildren's children's lifetimes. Not ours." For readers exhausted by the news and resistant to the righteous rhetoric of both sides in this war, Lewis' vital and elegant, humane and compassionate work will be embraced and treasured. -Alicia Ostriker, 2024