Two Seasons in Israel: A Selection of Peace and War Haiku

In Two Seasons in Israel, award-winning book artist and poet Rick Black takes readers on a journey through the stark images of Israel’s landscape—images of peace and war, of hope and fear and the way in which they blend together.

Arab and Jew
walk past each other:
blind alleyway

Black, who worked as a reporter for three years in the Jerusalem bureau of The New York Times, blends together his keen eye for detail and a subtle sense of irony. Here you’ll discover haiku in Jerusalem’s alleyways and the Galilee’s orchards, at war memorials and religious shrines.

“I knew that I would never be able to capture the essence of the country, its paradoxes and contradictions, in my reporting,” says Black. “The language of journalism and dictates of the newspaper trade simply would not allow it.”

When he first revisited Israel in the mid-1990s, he decided to use haiku -- that well-known, short Japanese nature poem -- in order to write about Israel. He wanted to focus intently on specific moments that reflect the heartrending nature of daily life. So, he made connections between olive trees and refugee camps, military cemeteries and blossoming rosemary, great blue herons and F-16s.

“I hope that these haiku will help provide a glimpse of the country’s ironies and in a small way inspire hope in a region so in need of it,” says Black, who covered the first Palestinian intifada and the first Persian Gulf war as well as many other stories.

Even though haiku are more associated with nature than peace and war, he is not the first to tap the genre’s versatility. In fact, Black was inspired by Nick Virgilio, a fellow New Jersey poet, who wrote eloquently about the loss of his brother in the Vietnam War.

In subsequent visits over the years, Black wrote numerous haiku. Ironically, the smallness of haiku quite aptly mirrors the tiny size of Israel. These poems are like silent witnesses of a torn country. Can one find peace in a land so riven by war? Black answers the question with a poem that’s almost a prayer in itself.

last clouds—
if only the violence would
drift away, too
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200 poems
17 black and white photos

Cover photo by Rina Castelnuovo of an Arab in a keffiyeh and a Jew in a prayer shawl, walking past each other in opposite directions in the Old City of Jerusalem.