.

Supernova

With no notice, the rockets destroyed festive peace,
And a volley of bullets brought death and dismay.
Ben ran straight to his car, telling strangers, “Get in!
I can take you to town, a safe distance away.”

As they raced over roads, on the lookout for foes,
He called home with a warning about the attack.
Forty minutes’ maneuver through hazardous paths
Won a refuge for four, but Ben said, “I’ll go back.”

“Risk your life to reach hell?” They cried, “No, Ben, don’t go.
Any left there would say, ‘Don’t return! God forbid!’”
He charged back, since those regions round Gaza were known
From his childhood and soldierly service he did.

At the festival grounds he found five frantic youth,
Strangers too, all in need of escape from Hamas
On its rampage of rape and crude bragging of death.
Ben’s sedan saved those five from planned murder en masse.

Ben Shimoni, more brilliant than millions that day,
Supernova exploding that others might thrive,
He and many were heroes who brightened skies gray;
Yet again he went back, so one more would survive.

He asked Gaya, a colleague, to send her location.
“Here it is. In a bush, you’ll see Romi and me.”
In a bush? To dodge bullets and terror’s damnation?
With those two, then Ofír, they were ready to flee.

On the phone as he drove, Ben reported he saw
Men ahead. On whose side? Raucous crash. Talking ceased.
Two lives lost to shots fired. One died later in Gaza,
But the rescue’s successful, now that Romi’s released.

.

Romi: Romi Gonen, only survivor of Ben Shimoni’s third car trip away from the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023, was released from Hamas captivity on January 19, 2025.

.

.

Hostage

—excerpt from the testimony of Eli Sharabi
to the United Nations

Humanitarian aid supplies a feast
For terrorists torturing humanity.
Their hostages must beg them for the least
Fragment of bread, or choose a sip of tea.
They starve as chains gnaw flesh, in hellish dark,
While captors gorge from boxes with the UN mark.

Where were the unconcerned United Nations?
Who cared about starvation and the beatings?
We’re grateful for the progress of some meetings,
But for our friends unfreed we’re loudly waiting.

.

.

Margaret Coats lives in California.  She holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University.  She has retired from a career of teaching literature, languages, and writing that included considerable work in homeschooling for her own family and others.

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14 Responses

  1. Warren Bonham

    Thanks for telling these stories and doing it so well! The Supernova imagery is brilliant (pun intended). I suppose this makes Hamas akin to a Black Hole that exerts a massive gravitational pull on everything around it. Somehow, otherwise normal people get trapped in orbit around their hellacious ideas. Many in the UN have fallen into this camp.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Warren, thanks for the comment. Your analogy of the black hole is a good one. Impressionable people far away from the scene, wanting to identify with a popular cause, and sometimes to curry favor with organizers of demonstrations, do not think of horrors the terrorist group has been responsible for, except perhaps of the injuries suffered by Gazans whom they use as human shields for what you call the “hellacious ideas” leading to their actions. I can think of numerous “black holes” that have drawn people in during the course of history.

      Reply
  2. David Whippman

    Margaret, thank you for these timely poems. It adds insult to injury that we have to watch idiotic young activists and rock bands screaming support of hamas. So your poems are a breath of sanity and decency.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks, David. I think there will soon be a new book about Shimoni and many, many others entitled “We’re on Our Way: The Civilians Who Saved Lives on October 7.” I was inspired by hearing of it on talk radio, and thought it had already appeared in English as well as the original 2024 publication in Hebrew. The author is Nachum Avniel. But though I find some reviews of a French version, there seem to have been delays with publication in the United States and the United Kingdom. I got my information about Shimoni’s amazing feats from several English-language television presentations originating in Israel, which have been posted on YouTube.

      Reply
  3. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Amazing stories of death-defying courage and endurance told in chilling detail. Thank you for bringing these to our attention with such admirable rhyme and rhythm. You have given us pause to reflect on heroism in action and the plight of those in captivity while the evil feast and the innocent starve. These poems are a service and ode to humanity while exposing the inhumanity of others.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks, Roy. It’s an opportunity to add a little light of mine to the great light Ben Shimoni gave by self-sacrifice for strangers–and to the great service Eli Sharabi did us by his full account of all he suffered. It is much longer but his two most important points to the UN are here. I think of your preferences when I come to recording these things in rhyme and rhythm!

      Reply
  4. Martin Rizley

    Both of these poems serve to highlight the manifestations of light and darkness that appear in times of armed conflict between human beings. The first poem celebrates the self-sacrifice of one man who chose to aid his fellow men in an hour of nightmarish darkness before he went out with the “exploding brightness” of a supernova. You have written a very moving tribute to the heroism of this individual. I think the selection of anapestic tetrameter was the perfect meter for this narrative, because of its rolling, driving rhythm that underscores the atmosphere of suspense. That suspense builds as Ben Shimoni finds himself in a “race against time” seeking to rescue as many as he can before meeting with his own death.

    The second poem, by contrast, shows the very dark side of armed conflict between human beings, which is sadly on display when world organization like the UN shows cold, uncaring incompetence in their response to human suffering and when humanitarian aid intended to help the needy ends up providing their oppressors with an occasion for self-indulgence as they gorge on the food intended for their hungry captives.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thank you, Martin, for approving the meter. I did want a rapid “driving” rhythm for the tribute to Shimoni, and I’m glad you find it both moving and appropriately suspenseful. The second poem here may ultimately become much longer, as Eli Sharabi presented the United Nations with an extended description of how armed conflict dreadfully alters the life of individual and family. He spoke of simple kibbutz life as comparative heaven in relation to the hell of his hostage experience. When he was released, an Israeli official tried to comfort him by saying his mother and sister were waiting for him. Sharabi responded, “Bring me my wife and daughters.” That was when he had to learn they had been killed in the very “safe room” where he left them, assuring them defense forces would soon arrive, because “they always come.” Heartbreakingly dark. Just as touching in his testimony, though, was the appeal for a friend he made while both were hostages chained in the dark Gaza tunnels. That’s why, in the above brief “Hostage” poem, I placed both the rebuke about gross misuse of humanitarian aid, and the plea for “friends unfreed.”

      Reply
  5. Brian Yapko

    This is an important set of well-crafted poems, Margaret, which pay tribute to the moral clarity and courage of one man who chose to do a heroic thing despite great danger to himself; and which is an indictment of the evil that the United Nations not only tolerates but perpetrates.

    The title “Supernova” is extremely clever – both a tribute to the Nova Musical Festival and to the star – the heroic subject of your poem — which outshines all others even as it goes through its death throes and yet will be long-remembered. This is a difficult poem because of the intense action and horrors described. You make no attempt to whitewash or “prettify” the scene and there is an immediacy to the action which is not your usual style but which is both respectful of the subject and intense. It does not come off as “refined” (which would weaken the poem) but as honest and powerful. Perfect rhymes and perfect meter in this case would be an affront. Your poem is poetic yet appropriately loosened – like someone removing his tie to assist in CPR. Nor does Hamas deserve a perfect rhyme. You have tapped into a poetic technique here, Margaret, which I have not seen you often use – “Supernova” is simpler than your poetry often is – not primitive but almost journalistic in vocabulary and pacing — perhaps for that very reason I find it impressive. It is, perhaps, a factor of your fidelity to the emotional intensity and of the subject matter.

    I’m very glad that you wrote about the United Nations in “Hostage.” Writing your poem in the voice of one witness/victim is far more effective than a third-party rant would have been. It is more refined than “Supernova” which is appropriate given its purpose as formal testimony. The U.N. has become an organization whose primary purpose appears to be the demonization of Israel and the lionizing of any country or entity which attacks Jews. It affirmatively assisted the terrorists of October 7, 2023 through its corrupt UNRWA program. It is an entity, fueled by intense antisemitism and a love of defamation, which has long outlived any semblance of fairness or purpose. It is hard to know where incompetence ends and malevolence begins.

    Well done, well-conceived, both.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thank you, Brian! Every subject, as well as each lyric genre, has its decorum, and I appreciate your judgment that I chose well here. It is true that I usually want to bring refined words little used into currency, but in the Shimoni tribute, fragment sentences at the crisis point and an extrametrical syllable for the ending line are better. You do recognize too all the value of “supernova” as a comparison for this valiant individual. Ben Shimoni is being called an angel, but the power and brightness of a supernova also suit the extraordinary heroism of his last day.

      As I told Martin Rizley, I am thinking of making a long poem from that more formal testimony of Eli Sharabi. It will be too long for SCP, but his admirable, articulate address to the UN deserves to be recorded in English verse. I just chanced to see it live. It is a telling rebuke to an organization founded for peacekeeping when one man can take his personal and family horrors of war experience to throw back against the United Nations as “unconcerned.” He did it slowly, with poster-size photographs of the peaceful past, reminiscent of legal exhibits documenting his case.

      If you or anyone else wants to see Sharabi’s full account, don’t take anything shorter than 45 minutes as the entire speech. Among what’s available right now, the Times of India video, almost an hour and a half (with added commentary) seems best. The program, from United Nations TV distributed by the Associated Press, belongs in a honored archive.

      Reply
  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    When UNRWA trucks brought foodstuffs and supplies into Gaza, all of those trucks were taken by Hamas fighters. The food was given first to Hamas fighters and their families, and then to specially favored locals in the Hamas administration. After that, the rest of the food and supplies were sold to those Gazan civilians who could afford to pay, or else sold to third parties so that Hamas could raise more funds for its war. All of this was done with the complete knowledge and consent of the United Nations.

    The United Nations is a poisonous entity whose reflex reaction is to provide support for anti-Western terrorism, while parading and posturing as a “humanitarian” body.

    Reply
    • Mike Bryant

      Joe, it is not only the UN. We, the USA, through NeoCons, the Deep State, and USAID, have created the Hamas Billionaires that have been running Hamas and Gaza forever.

      Surprise, WAR PAYS! The same thing is happening everywhere… even here! Who’d-a guessed it?

      Reply
  7. Cynthia L Erlandson

    You’ve said so much here, Margaret— so much dreadfully sad truth. I’m awed by your ability to tackle such a horrifying and intimidating subject.

    Reply
  8. Maria

    Dear Margaret, I have been trying to write a comment and have deleted some attempts as I simply cannot find the words. But I would like to thank you for writing this very masterful and important poem. It is a much needed memorial to a beautiful soul who like many others was cruelly murdered. He died saving others, May his memory be eternal.

    Reply

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