“Go outside.” Oak Parker Hila Ratzabi writes in her poem, How to Pray While the World Burns, “Find a patch of grass, sand, dir./Sit, kneel, place a hand or just/A finger to the soft earth/Feel it pulse back.”
The piece is from Ratzabi’s first collection of poems “There are Still Woods,” a collection of 48 clear-eyed, open-hearted, well-tuned ruminations, meditations, and other assorted bits of autobiographical encounters with nature and God, and on-going search for a wholeness in an aching, broken world. This is hardly surprising.
Ratzabi has been an active environmentalist from childhood; her poems are steeped in an appreciation of nature and awareness of the environment. “How to Pray While the World Burns” was written, in part, to respond to the catastrophic forest fires in California. Other of her poems comment on climate change and the “End of the Anthropocene” (literally the title of one of her pieces).
Ratzabi conducts regular poetry workshops in Thatcher Woods and at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
“I take people on an eco-poetry walk,” she said. “I give them a packet of poems, we read the poems we discuss then, and then they get sent out on an exercise to go out into the woods and to write something based on a prompt and then come back and share.”
Ratzabi is a great believer in tikkun olam, the concept in modern Judaism, referring to performing actions that repair and improve the world. “Tikkun Olam is a value that guides my life,” she said.
“How to Pray…” ends with these healing words: “The earth hears your prayer…You are held/You are heard./The wind pulls its blanket over your back/Smooths the hair from your face/Touches your cheek/With its cool, trembling hands.” Reassuring lines for a troubled, troubling time.
Ratzabi grew up in a bilingual household. Her mother was American, her father Israeli.
“My father’s side of the family originally came from Yemen to Israel.”
Her ancestors were originally from a small town called Rasab in Yemen.
“Many Jews with my last name came from that town,” she said.
They relocated to Israel four generations ago. Her father was born there in 1943, five years before the founding of the state of Israel.
Ratzabi was born in Israel but moved with her family to the Borough of Queens in New York City when she was three years old.
They spoke Hebrew in the house, but English was the main language spoken outside of home. That may be why her poetry glitters with the keen, precise expertise of someone nimble in two languages.
As a kid, Ratzabi loved reading, especially poetry. She said she remembered especially liking the poetry Jack Perlutsky wrote for kids.
Here is a sample Perlutsky poem: “Be glad your nose is on your face/not pasted on some other place/for if it were where it is not/you might dislike your nose a lot.”
“There’s videos of me as a little kid reciting poems by heart,” Ratzbi said, “cute little funny poems about animals and things like that. From a young age, I loved the play of the language; there was something about the musicality and the sounds and the playfulness [in poetry] that appealed to me.”
Ratzabi’s earliest memory of writing poetry was in elementary school. “I wrote a poem for a contest in a local Queens newspaper.”
She came in second place. “My mother saved the poem. I still have the little clipping. She framed it.”
Ratzabi went through an obligatory “bad high school poetry phase” (as many of us did) but grew out of it in college. Ratzabi mentioned two readings in particular — featuring novelists Jhumpa Lahiri and Mary Gordon — that opened her eyes: “I was just, like, oh, wow, I didn’t know you could really be an author.”
College was also when she took a “real poetry workshop for first” with poet Marie Howe. “It just really opened everything up for me.”
Later, Ratzabi went to graduate school at Sarah Lawrence, where Howe taught.
I asked Ratzabi if that was where she found her calling as a poet. She answered: “I don’t know if poetry is a calling but rather something that has followed me around all my life like a lost dog.”
Ratzabi moved to Oak Park in August 2020, with her husband and two boys. This is her first foray into the Midwest. Before that, she lived primarily in the East, in New York City and Philadelphia.
When I asked her, like a good Oak Parker, how she likes our village, she said: “It’s great! I mean, it’s cold, but I love the culture. It’s more relaxed. People are very friendly. I love New York, too, but it’s different. It’s just very crowded, and it’s dirtier, and there’s garbage on the street, and things like that. So, this is just a little bit more laid back for me. And I like being close to Chicago. I like having access to the culture, the arts, and the music. Oak Park reminds me a lot of Queens, actually — houses with small backyards.”
Is that enough for a poet with an environmental bent?
“It’s not the most lush environment,” she acknowledged, “But being here dovetails with this point in my life where I want to learn more. I love nature, but I didn’t study nature. Now I’m learning to garden and grow vegetables, and I’m learning the names of all the native plants in my garden and going out on hikes and seeing all the wildlife that we get. You know. The foxes that are in my backyard sometimes, and the hawks, and the different types of birds.”
Ratzabi practices what she preaches. This spring, you may just find her kneeling in her garden, placing a hand or just a finger in the soft earth to feel it pulse back.
