A Prayer of Six Wings by Owen Lewis
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No grief should be privileged, and no grief should be silenced.
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.
Year first published: 2025
