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# “Love / is paying attention”

### Action in action

[Pádraig Ó Tuama](https://substack.com/@padraigotuama)

Mar 01, 2026

Dear friends,

Many years ago, I taught a weeklong course on a small boat off the south coast of France. If that sounds idyllic to you, you’re half right. The people were lovely, and the setting was gorgeous: 15 or 16 students in class (the topic was reconciliation) for four hours a day.

I love being on boats, but I do get a little motion sickness. As the week went by, news of an incoming storm came through. And we — in our seagoing sail training ketch — needed to move from where we were moored to somewhere else. At night. During a storm. I was anxious about keeping up a teaching schedule and keeping my food down. It was a small vessel, so on the night of the storm I went and chatted to the guy who was captaining us until I was so tired I was falling asleep on my feet. Then, sometime around 2 a.m., I lay out on a bench in the galley (someone had told me it was the place least likely to experience too much turbulence). I woke a few hours later and realised I was warm — someone had placed a heavy woolen blanket over me. I can still feel the rough fibres of that covering, navy blue, smelling of land and lanolin.

“Love is a blanket on a stormy night,” I thought.

What is love? It is many things. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s beautiful poem “Dukka” says it like so:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

```
… Love
is paying attention, I remark, and you
repeat it to me. Love is also the father
who plants an olive tree for every newborn
trusting they will grow up to harvest it. Love is
the elderly woman who stood inside
Damascus Gate knowing the settlers
were on a rampage, knowing
what her body would have to endure. Love is a story
we never tire of telling, just as Shireen
told it with a microphone and a camera
```

##### From the book _[Something about Living](https://bookshop.org/p/books/something-about-living-national-book-award-winner-lena-khalaf-tuffaha/36ae252ef2fed3c9?ean=9781629222738&next=t&aid=10066&listref=featured-on-the-poetry-unbound-podcast)_ (University of Akron Press, 2024)

Love is action, the poet tells us: action for the future, action in the moment of noticing, action of protection or challenge or exposure, action of bearing witness. Shireen Abu Akleh — the Shireen mentioned above — was a Palestinian American journalist who was killed by the Israeli military in 2022 while covering a raid in Jenin. In this way, the poem is saying that love is also telling the truth “with a microphone and a camera”.

What else is love? Love is asking. Or, as [Rachel Mann’s poem “#TDOR”](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rachel-mann-tdor/id1492928827?i=1000750679478) from last week reminds us, it may be in silence or, at least, in learning to ask better questions.

Where has love been an action for you? In your own life, yes. But also in your civic life. In 2019, at the Belfast funeral of another murdered journalist, Lyra McKee, I listened to a mild-mannered priest address the gathered politicians (and there were many), noting that they were all in the same room, finally, and then asking, “ [Why in God’s name does it take the death of a 29-year-old woman with her whole life in front of her to get to this point?](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-48039266)”

The congregation — it was a funeral for a Catholic journalist in a standing-room-only Protestant cathedral — did the most unusual thing. We rose to our feet clapping, clapping, clapping. The British government had been posturing in the post-Brexit lunacy, and here at the funeral were many British and Irish politicians, including the UK Prime Minister. What could people do? Very little, it seemed. But we could make noise, and in a cathedral, we did. It was just applause, one small gesture among many actions. It did something, though — a message was delivered and heard. Politicians heard a people's mandate through the sustained rage of our sound. Hands clapping and clapping and clapping — in a cathedral containing the body of a 29-year-old journalist in a coffin — like an exorcism, like a shout at the meaninglessness of it all, like a call to love in action.

> So here is this week’s prompt: **Tell us about an action of love you’ve seen lately.** That is our poem. As Lena Khalaf Tuffaha says, “Love / is paying attention, I remark and you / repeat it to me.”

PS: Season 10 of _Poetry Unbound_ ends this coming week. However, there’ll be a little bonus episode the week after, with teasers of what else is to come for 2026. And — Krista has a magnificent new season of _On Being_ airing at the moment — and this week featured [her conversation with poets Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo](https://onbeing.org/programs/joy-harjo-and-tracy-k-smith-this-world-is-full-of-everything-good-everything-beautiful/).