From There to Here 

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Author’s Note: This poem began with questions about the misunderstanding and criminalization of the slogan “from the river to the sea,” which at heart is a call for freedom for Palestinians in their ancestral land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Setting the phrase beside similar rhetorical constructions revealed a history of empire, atrocity, hope, and struggle—all of the transformations from here to there which tell our human story.   

From There to Here

From ashes to ashes, from mud  

to bone, from sundown to sundown,  

from your mouth to god’s ear,  

from bondage to freedom, from rags  

to riches, from the desert  

to the Euphrates, from head to toe,  

from hand to mouth, from dead  

to worse, from the Cape to Cairo,  

from the river to the sea, from top  

to bottom, from first to last,  

from Crimea to Kamchatka,  

from Belgrade to Mokha, from time  

to time again and again, from dawn  

to dusk, from the huddled masses  

to the golden door, from the treeline  

to the sand, from darkness to light,  

from the earth to the moon,  

from start to finish, from here  

to eternity, from Heaven to Hell,  

from house to house, from the trains  

to the ovens, from my heart to yours, 

from left to right, From A to Z,  

from high to low, from generation  

to generation, from all of us  

to all of you, from sea to shining sea, 

from sand to glass, from dust to dust.

Robin Beth Schaer is a writer and educator. She is the author of the poetry collection Shipbreaking and a work in progress on art and atrocity. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Paris Review, and Jewish Currents, among others. Her recent awards include a fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.