November honors, a lullaby

It is black and white again, spotlights and confetti,

honors and regrets, winter. It is for this I live.

I sing to the stuttering TV of November 1963,

a girl my age, and her younger brother saluting the death parade.

One dies. Another will be reborn. The house is surrounded

by leafless trees. But o how the light in winter shines.

Note: I am relieved at the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, with some hope restored. But like most joys, it is mixed with shadows, and I feel melancholy. This is not a bad thing. "Sorrow wears, grief tears, melancholy soothes." I keep saying to myself, "Be the change you want to see ..." It's up to me, you see.

There will be lacerations

In the big world of wounds, a tiny laceration of thin skin breaks my heart. I had come for two weeks to help my daughter and son-in-law get through the waking agonies of a baby in teething torment. When a person is sleep deprived reality gets warped and minor scenes such as the pile of dishes akimbo in the sink or the laundry’s soft but menacing hill become unconquerable mountains. So, we three, the baby’s mama, daddy and grammy, triple-teamed and walked, rocked, cuddled, soothed, washed, straightened, folded, slept a little and tried to find the balance of sanity. How we long for his teeth to cut through the skin of his upper gums where four teeth hover shyly, their faces pressed against the translucent glass! (When I contemplate teething babies who suffer like this, I question the existence of God.)

Just before I left them to return to the farm, work and routines, James was cruising toward his daddy’s Macbook, so I quickly shut it. The timing was synchronized with his sudden reach. The closing laptop pinched the tiny middle finger of his right hand. Then it began to bleed, he wailed and we blubbered (mama and I) while we raced and washed and examined it for depth and seriousness (quick spurts of energy from nowhere!), while she nursed him, and daddy helped me prepare a Band-aid (his first!) — the very skin I wish to be permeable so that I might get inside and love him more completely than I do. But not like this. The blood that flows between us must be kept hidden in its treasure box, in the magic passages where a flying carpet would be humdrum.

There can be no thing that possibly comes close in worth to that thin translucent finger the size of a worm in its ill-fitting bandage. He sucked on it, seeming to understand this.

There will be lacerations. They are openings to the next tiny death swimming toward us, and to all the big ones. 

A different kind of storm

While my intent in the last post was to write feelings from my own experiences of storms, I now feel that I was insensitive to post it when others have had, and now have, such catastrophic encounters with storms of a far greater magnitude. Please forgive me for not thinking it through well enough to protect my dear friends who have been so bruised by storms of a different kind. I am leaving that post, though I would dearly love to take it down. I feel it's an important lesson for me. The steps of this process matter.

I love you all.

The Wind

Sounds like wing feathers

brushing screens and eaves,

and then a single cello note

spidering through the casement

on this gray dress of a day, full skirted,

embroidered with blowing leaves,

crisp-crinolined with dry corn stalks.

I love a storm, I love a storm, I love a storm.

But not for the grief torn through a far-off house—

       violent, stubborn, deranged.

I love it when I forget—seduced

by a smoking, rolled up sky,

black leather trees bending

in whispers and cracks,

humming suggestions just bass enough

to believe that another poor soul

might be abused by this power,

but not me, surely not me. Not today.