Content Warning: This article contains mentions of war and military violence.

“They publish that they are devastated, absent. That each flight is a hectic response to unseen catastrophe. It is one in a series of analogies for inner states … a matter of cloudiness, a matter of storms.” – Andrea Rexilius

Try asking a child, about four or five or seven, who they are. They will stare at you blankly, maybe giggle a bit, furrow their brow or adamantly answer “I’m me!” They might say their name, their age. When you ask them again, “Who are you?” the child remains silent. This, at least, was my experience as a teacher at a small summer camp in New York two years ago. I was curious how children viewed themselves in our small corner of the world, where everything seemed so large, so tall and especially confusing as they emerged from the pandemic. It has always concerned me how small children live through big times (which is all of history, essentially).

My students’ silence over two years ago comes to mind today as I read reports of children dying by the thousands in the Israel-Hamas war. Nearly 30 children have died in Israel, according to PBS, with over 4,000 more children dead in Palestine, according to Al Jazeera. I keep thinking of that question: “Who are you?” as each report comes.

Who are you? “Wounded Child No Surviving Family.” WCNSF. This is an acronym Dr. Tanya Has Hassan, a pediatric intensive care unit doctor with Doctors Without Borders, told CNN she has used as the war in Gaza escalates. She tells stories of hospitals filled with an “avalanche of human suffering,” of mothers struggling to give birth, of a suicidal child who no longer wanted to feel the fear of death. WCNSF. If the children I taught were ever described with those five words, I would have an irreparable wound. When our children go, what do they leave behind? Us?

The vicissitudes of the self are endless when contemplating the question of who we are in the wake of death.

“I was asked if I am myself. I am myself,” Andrea Rexilius, a poet, writes in her collection of poems entitled “Half of What They Carried Flew Away.” It is the type of line, declarative and full, that I want every child able to utter. In a panel I covered the other day about George Floyd called “Let’s Talk About George Floyd,” The Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Toluse Olorunnipa was asked what a just world would look like. He described a world where seven-year-old Floyd, dreaming of being a Supreme Court Justice, would not only be alive, but able to thrive. Is this not what we want for every child in this world?

These are complex questions, ones I confront with Rexilius’ lyrical poetry.

Here’s another question of hers: “Could you symbolize your idea of the self?” I am with my students in being unsure of what the self entails. I might start with a name. “4,000” could be the start. You attach the noun “children” to its end, and now you can envision four unsure thousands of children. Attach an adjective, like “dead,” “murdered” or “killed,” to 4,000 children, and another of Rexilius’ questions comes to mind: “How do you not recognize your own face, hand, circumstance?” Rexilius answers: “Half of what we carried flew away. Impalpable. A kind of ceaseless, stratus shape.”

In the face of tragedy, I search not only for intellectual understanding but a salve or balm for rest. This is what Rexilius’ collection has done for me. It has helped me understand a new event in this world despite it not being a piece of reportage or work that deals directly with this war.

And yes, it is true that we bring our experiences to a piece of work. We misread and we shift the intentions of the author to our own interpretations. Perhaps I misread Rexilius’ work, maybe I have personalized someone else’s clauses to my own needs. But when you’re grieving, almost everything is inflected with what you’re grieving. All I can say for certain is when I read Rexilius, I remember a child, and I hear an uncertain voice mapping its relationship to the world. In her poems, I see the small figure of a person in the face of a colossal system.

“Extreme conditions bring delirium,” she writes in one lyric. It is the extreme that I seek in Rexilius’ work, her observations that make succinct the secluded, biological pains of living.

“They decide they are as small as ants. It happens on the cellular level,” she writes at the beginning of her book. “It happens as a result of frustration. Like daffodils in the middle of the Pacific. It was already happening, like the sun in this place, their lungs helped them to arrive.”

Rexilius has a unified style of brokenness, recitation and rotation in her words. She is trying to arrive somewhere, unraveling something while knowing the limitations of her subject and prose. She offers the type of brokenness that helps us make sense of current events, and it offers an answer about the self: It can be broken, it can be lost and it certainly dies.

“I am neither a woman nor a man in the light,” she writes at the end of her book. “I am like an animal that was slain.”

In the age of information, when grief is ready to spring upon us, how can we bring ourselves together in the flood of articles and reports? Do we claim we know history? Do we grieve? Do we attempt to understand? Or, just like Rexilius’ personas, are we simply too little to perceive the breadth of what we face?

“They are caught between being treated as criminals and being able to eat,” Rexilius writes. “But history is not a moving personal narrative about dispossession. In fact it occupies itself at war with itself. It creates oppositional dualities, unnatural boundaries. They rediscover or uncover the proclamation of the crossroads of the land.”

This is the mystique of reading and poetry. It is the continual unfolding of the self in the midst of the world and its eruptions. In our readings and writings, we can begin constructing or understanding the world anew.

Shane Dimapanat is a junior writing about not-talked-about-enough, obscure media that should be culturally accessible. Their column, “Uncultured,” runs once a month on Thursdays.