Rename it Year-the-Redwing-Blackbirds-Came-to-the-Yard.
Is it true they were never here before?
Or was I not here enough to hear them?
Rename it How-to-Read-Eyes-101. Or
Intro-to-Zoom. Or Age-of-the-Unmoving-Odometer.
Is that any better than COVID-19, which grates
like the righteous shouts of politicians?
Or coronavirus, which sounds like
a chorus of ventilators?
Call it Killer-of-the-Wise-Generation.
Or Bringer-of-Empty-Schoolyards.
Period-When-I-Lean-into-Uncertainty.
Time-I-Know-How-Human-We-Are.
Silver-Lining-for-Introverts.
Yet-Another-Chapter-of-Inequity.
Call it Life-Taker. World-Changer.
Pandemic. Prayer-breeder.
Loss-Bringer. Choice-Maker.
Teacher.
Posts Tagged ‘Corona Virus’
Renaming the Chapter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus on May 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »
May 19, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, daily life, daughter, mother, quiet on May 19, 2021| 6 Comments »
Will I remember this day with its greening of grass,
its blooming of apple blossom, its stilling of pond?
Will I remember the sweetness of my daughter
not leaving the house for school on a Wednesday
because her classes are all online? Will I remember
how she comes to snuggle on the couch during lunch
and pinches my cheeks and teases me about my ugly feet?
Will I remember the terrible yellow sticky casings
of the cottonwood seeds, how they glue to the hood
of my car that rarely moves from the drive? Or
the lavender in the garden that always looks
grey and dead before it erupts into fragrant life?
Perhaps there is some wave of presence
that will carry such stillness forward, a current
of quiet, a tide of tenderness that will insist
on itself for years to come. How forgettable
it all is—and how cherished—this swooping of swallows,
this opening of iris. How necessary, this holding
my daughter while the dark pool of night curls around us,
this cradling each other as we say nothing at all.
Walking up the Fall Creek Road, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, meeting the self, walking on May 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
I see my old self walking down.
She doesn’t have a mask in her pocket.
She doesn’t move to walk six feet away.
She leans in to hug me, as if it were the most natural,
ordinary thing to do. She looks offended
when I offer her an elbow.
She doesn’t yet know how a virus
will use genome origami to infect and replicate
inside host cells with terrible efficiency.
She doesn’t know the schools will close
and the stores will close and the streets will close
and the doors will close and it will all happen
in a week. She doesn’t know her daughter
will cry herself to sleep each night for weeks.
She doesn’t know her son will slip
into a darkness and rage she will try to carry.
How the days of her calendar will empty.
How pixilated her life will become.
How the hospital won’t let visitors in .
How she will miss her mother, her father, her friends.
How millions and millions will die.
And that’s just the health of it.
Part of me wants to tell her what’s coming.
I don’t.
Part of me wants to hug her back,
and I can’t quite explain why I do.
Because innocence.
Because she will be here soon.
Over a Year Later, I Grieve
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, friendship, Heartbeat, loss, singing on May 13, 2021| 2 Comments »
for Heartbeat, singing together since 1994
Every week we sang, sang blues
and ballads, folk songs,
rounds, pop songs, jazz,
love songs, chants. And we
didn’t just sing, we touched
and hugged, leaned in and loved,
ran our fingers through the waves
of each other’s hair, laughed till we peed,
and jostled and shoved and teased
and offered tissues and kissed cheeks
and brought the shared melodic air
into our bodies and returned it
into the room in currents of ecstatic song.
Oh we sang, how we sang, as if
singing were a life raft that kept us afloat
on the aching broken world.
Now, I sing alone in the kitchen.
Sometimes I’m haunted by the part
I sing—a harmony line unanchored
by the melody. With no tonic,
the tune feels off. There is so much
that’s missing, that’s lost.
Sometimes I make up a new song
and sing about what is here.
Good morning, hummingbird.
Good morning, loneliness. Good
morning big empty room.
The air holds the notes like shimmering drops
that sometimes leak out of my eyes
when I think of how we sang, the music
a life raft, and your voices, my friends, the oars.
Other Shoes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, friendship, healing, identity on May 5, 2020| 8 Comments »
We all belong to the same galactic oneness.
—Carlos Santana, Master Class
I could be the doctor who, overwhelmed
in the ER, went home and killed herself.
I could be the sixteen-year-old boy
who had to cover his father with a white sheet
before the coroner arrived.
I could be the white sheet.
I could be the lawmaker unable to sleep,
or her pillow that hears her cry out in fear
when at last the sleep arrives.
I could be the rhythmic hissing of the ventilator
or the wail of the wife, or the weary hum
of the custodian beneath her mask
as she wipes the surfaces clean.
It could be me, the eleventh death
in the town next door to mine.
It could be me, the one who
unknowingly makes you sick
because I don’t know I carry
something deadly inside my breath.
And so I don’t hug you when I see you
across the post office lobby,
though my heart leaps up to hold you.
Because you could be the flat line
on the EKG.
Because you could be number twelve.
After Reading the Headline About Rising Deaths
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, Corona Virus, courage, garden, resilience, song on May 4, 2020| 3 Comments »
Today I take the courage I don’t feel
and the resilience I doubt and
all my unspent longing to serve,
and I bring them, cupped in my hands,
to the garden. They nestle there in my palms
like three baby birds that have not yet
opened their eyes. I take them to hear
the pungent song of the garlic shoots
and the thriving chives who chant
how to survive the winter.
I bring them to hear the strawberry leaves
who sing how to flourish despite the frost.
and the old song of chicken manure
and composted grass that hum about
how old life begets new life.
And they open their tiny beaks,
as if they could eat the green song.
How vulnerable they are.
So I open to the song, too.
I do what must be done.
I take in the nourishing song,
and feed them with my own mouth.
Still Swimming
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, death, hair, mom, parenting, river, son on May 4, 2020| 2 Comments »
And so I pull the purple comb
through my son’s thick hair,
the same way I’ve seen
the stylists do at Great Clips.
Wet the hair. Comb it through.
Part it. Hold it between
two fingers. Cut vertically. Snip,
and his hair falls to the floor.
Comb it through. Snip. Snip.
We both know that I
have no clue what I’m doing.
So we laugh as the hair
piles up on the floor.
We chatter, the way
a stylist and customer would,
talking of school and his friends
and his unruly cowlicks. Snip.
I remember that time
I was trapped underwater
by the river’s hydraulics,
how I stared up at the light
shining through the surface
and thought, I don’t think
it’s my time yet to die.
And the river spit me out
and I swam hard as I could
through the rapid toward shore.
I don’t think it’s my time yet
to die. Nor my son’s. Though
all around us the news of dying—
the numbers increasing every day,
stories of beloveds who are gone.
We ask ourselves, how do we
go on? And meanwhile, we do.
We go on. And because my son’s hair
is too long for his taste,
I learn how to cut it by cutting it.
How much more will we learn
as this goes on? How to share?
How to grieve? How to let go? How to live?
And meanwhile, life spits us out
into sunlight, and we come up
spluttering, gasping, surprised
we’re alive, and we swim, what a gift
to find we’re still swimming.
It’s All Practice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, new, self, self talk on April 9, 2020| 10 Comments »
Tonight I can laugh at the part of me
who thinks she should know
the right thing to do, the right thing to say.
Meanwhile, the rest of me
wakes up each morning in wonder,
marveling at the quickly changing world.
Every morning this second self practices
how to bathe, how to dress. Even now she is practicing
how to write a poem, how to make breakfast,
what to say to her friends, family, herself.
She knows there are so many ways to do it right.
Every moment contains invitations
she’s never noticed before. Sometimes
she practices saying nothing at all.
If you see her lingering beside the road,
it is because she is practicing how to walk
how to see. She used to know, of course,
but now she can’t seem to take anything
for granted, how to drink tea,
how to walk into a room, it’s all new,
how to weep, how to smile.
Believing Things that Seem Impossible
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, Corona Virus, impossible, love on April 8, 2020| 9 Comments »
Like the giant rock, balancing in the desert
on a slender pillar of sand. Like the way
the full moon seems so much larger
when it first rises. Like how the bluebird,
smaller than my open hand, migrates
up to two-thousand miles in the spring.
Every day, the world bewilders me,
as if daring me to believe in other
impossible things. Like how closeness
to death makes us more alive.
Like people all over the world
choosing kindness over chaos.
Like love, that against all odds,
continues to grow.