To listen to a reading of this creative piece by the author, click on the audio below:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the war planes must be silent.
-Marwan Makhoul
A woman writes her child’s name on a piece of white cloth. I write an email.
I walk down King’s Parade to my lab in the mornings. People in San Francisco lie down in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I watch a video in bed and listen for familiar words. I am still alive. In the afternoon, I make a waldorf salad with apples and blue cheese.
Before lunch, I kneel on the cobblestones to write the names of fifteen people I do not know on a piece of white cloth. Others do the same. This cloth is then unfurled over a bridge.
At Christmas, I listen to Vince Guaraldi, as I do every Christmas at home. In Bethlehem, Jesus lies on a pile of rubble. Children listen for falling bombs. I do not care much for god.
I walk down King’s Parade to my lab in the mornings. A million people walk along a dusty road to an empty place.
A child’s body hangs on a wall. I practise temporary amnesia daily.
A man who lives an hour away from my hometown sets himself on fire. I am brushing my teeth when the phone starts trembling in my hand. I breathe. It is a rare sunny day.
I watch a video of a woman making lentil soup in a tent. I take notes, then go to M&S and buy a bag of red lentils. I do not have a mortar and pestle, so I crush fresh garlic and chiles with the handle of my knife. I have courgettes and aubergines to fry in olive oil, which she does not.
I check my avocados to see where they were grown. An infant receives formula, only it is too late.
Bags of flour bathe in the blood of starving people. A man clears away the rubble to plant a row of seeds.
A child flies a kite. A child swims in the sea. A child dances in the sand. A child looks a soldier in the face and laughs. As a child, I loved the ocean. I loved looking out eastward across the Gulf of Mexico, towards the horizon, imagining a distant shore.
My mom sends me a photo of myself as a baby. A woman rocks her dead twins as though they are only sleeping.
In October, I think as I put my scarf on, I have seen this before. In December, I think, this is different. In February, I think, we have seen this before.
In April, I think, this is still happening. I cannot comprehend that this is still happening.
I hear the chants through the vents in my basement laboratory. My work is also important, I know. I would love to tell you about it sometime. I would love to tell you about it over a pot of tea. I would love to tell you about parental care, and an instinct so strong it changes the course of evolution. I would love to tell you about the meditation of doing the same small thing, over and over and over and over
in the hope, in the faith, of seeing something through.
I would love to tell you about women in science, about listening to audiobooks as I wash dishes, about specimen collections and seabirds and beetles and the smell of soil and the smell of home drifting on the sheets my mom mailed to me. I want to tell you how I buried my nose in it as soon as I opened the package.
The Scholar is an archive. Time is a bridge I cannot traverse until I reach you – you in the future – years from now. But The Scholar is a bridge for you in the future to reach me. It will tell you what I was thinking. You will know what I do not yet know. What we did or did not do. But I know enough. I tried to force myself to write something else.
I put off writing this, for fear of burning bridges. But I am not burning anything. These are only words. Yet my hands are shaking. With rage. With love.
The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the Editorial Board, the Scholars’ Council, the Gates Cambridge Trust or the University of Cambridge.
Willow Dalehite ['23] is completing a PhD in Zoology, researching wild beetle populations to learn about drivers of local adaptation in a fragmented habitat, which inform us about factors that allow species to adapt to human-induced environmental change. She is also the Gates Scholars Council’s President for the 2024 year.
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