The Scream of a Post-October 7th Jew

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in bed
cold beads
of sweat
catch me
still in the snare
of my nightmare

back at the home
of my childhood
walking past
the front door
realizing
it wasn’t quite
completely closed

I went to close it
on the other side
they were pushing
screaming, shoving
with such force

struggling
I tried to push back
but they were so many

coming for the Jew

spewing incoherent vitriol
their rhythmic battering
sounded the beat of
of an ancient hate

I tried to scream
for in my dream
my son was in the room
my brother used to have

but like my brother
my son‘s door was closed
with music playing
so he couldn’t hear
my strangled screams

dazed and in disbelief
inhuman strength surging
like those stories
of desperate mothers
lifting cars
off the helpless bodies
of their children

I shoved the door closed
despite the heaving mob
pounding from outside
so hard to click
that little lock closed

in suburban New York

First published by The Jewish Writing Project

Jessica Ursell

Jessica Ursell is a veteran JAG officer of the United States Air Force, poet, and public speaker against antisemitism and bigotry. The granddaughter of survivors of the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, and a descendant of a Taíno great-grandma, she understands in her bones what happens when intolerance, indifference, and ignorance take root in society. Jessica lives with her husband in Southern Italy where she writes about the complex interplay between trauma, power, love, loss, and madness. Her essays and poems include: At the Country Club with Superman; Standing Up for the Voiceless: My Fight with Royalty in Anne Frank’s House; What My Zayda Taught Me About Tikkun Olam; and The Scream of a Post-October 7th Jew, (The Jewish Writing Project); Sedimented Rock, and Climbing Vesuvius in Stilettos (Writing in a Woman’s Voice); Reverberations of October 7th: Musings of an American Jew on the Fourth of July, and Say Their Names (Iron Words: Israel War Stories). Jessica's poem, A Still-Life Collage of Lost Objects, appears in Down in the Dirt magazine as well as in the book, The Limits of Language, and the book Where Icarus Went. Her most recent poems are, Ricotta Cheese English, published by Mediterranean Poetry in November 2024 and I Can Walk Through Walls of Words, appearing in Academy of the Heart and Mind in December 2024. Jessica's poem, Mariupol Madonna: an elegy for the Mothers of Ukraine, will be published by Versopolis in Poetry Expo 2025. Multiple military audiences, most recently the United States Navy, Sixth Fleet, have heard Jessica speak about the importance of never being a bystander to evil which she believes is the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust.