Review of “CANTATA for a desert poet”

Anne Bower
February 2024

CANTATA for a desert poet
Sharon Lopez Mooney
ARTEIDOLIA PRESS 2024

CANTATA for a desert poet is the outcome of a difficult a task taken on by Sharon Lopez Mooney, obeying Salam Khalili’s wish that she tell his story in her words, a task saturated in the pain and love she still feels for him all these years since his death.

Khalili was a poet, painter, journalist, and peace activist, imprisoned by Israel for speaking out about certain aspects of the 1967 Six-Day War. After he’d been imprisoned and tortured for seven years and three years under house arrest, Amnesty International was able to intervene, and with the help of sponsors found sanctuary in California, where he met Mooney. His son and daughter came too, but from what we learn, none of them could ever feel this was home, Jerusalem always their motherland, always a missing part of their souls.

Mooney’s poetry is so evocative, so pulsing with emotion, that it’s hard not to grimace and crouch as one reads. Some of the poems are written in “poetic” form; that is, they have line breaks, interesting and often unconventional uses of punctuation, surprising gaps and enjambments. Others are written more like stories, prose poems that carry us along as if we’d gathered around a master storyteller, bound together by her words, warmed by her emotion. Sensory details bring us into Khalili’s experiences and the shared moments these two stole. The poems employ different perspectives: sometimes as if Khalili is telling a story, sometimes as if Mooney is addressing Salam, and at other times, a seeing from outside with events described almost like a movie.

Because they became so close, “He asked me to tell his one man’s story in my own original poetry for him. He laid his hope of sharing his truths in my hands . . . .” This must have been a difficult undertaking, and it’s obvious that Mooney has spared no energy in crafting her thoughts and his into these verses. I imagine revision and revision were required. She writes in one poem, “I sweep our left over disarranged words into my pockets so I can go over them again and again later alone.” The poignancy of that word, “alone,” weighs heavily.

A much-published poet, Mooney is well able to transmit the closeness she shared with Khalili. 

As she writes at one point,

I’ve become keeper of his soul
his homeland
his treasured secrets.

This collection is punctuated with snatches of Khalili’s own poetry, presented in Arabic without translation. Somehow, that makes this man we never knew seem more real, more substantial. Mooney writes that he never found poetic possibility in English and that although he did paint some, his late artwork lacks the presence of what he achieved earlier in life. What did survive, as Mooney makes clear, is the man’s spirit. This comes through especially in the poem “Little bird from the desert,” written in prose style.

In “Little bird…” we learn of a small wounded bird that Salam rescued from his prison cell’s window ledge and nursed back to health. As the bird strengthened it would fly away and return, but one day it was out in the exercise yard and a guard unwittingly stepped on it. The bird did not survive and the guard, actually apologized and that event began a friendship between the two. Later, when called to the prison warden’s office, the man of authority states, “even if you are lions, we can still put you behind bars,” as if to denigrate the poet’s life-giving efforts. But as Mooney tells us, Khalili retorts: “Oh no, on the contrary, Warden, even if you put us behind bars we are still lions.”

Sharon Lopez Mooney was an ordained Interfaith Minister with a broad and inclusive notion of what it means to have a spiritual life. And she was always creating new poems. In addition, for many years before her death in February 2024, Sharon hosted the Burlington Writers Group for Poetry on alternate Thursday evenings, always showing compassion and support for those participating. She often emailed participants additional comments and encouragement, signing off with “hhuuggs.” It’s a comfort to know that  she got to see CANTATA published before a heart condition ended her life.

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Anne Bower, poet, educator, author of Poems for Tai Chi Players, The Space Between Us, Getting it Down on Paper, as well as Recipes for Reading, Reel Food, and Introduction to African American Foodways.