“Sometimes,” a beloved poem begins, “things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse.” As a realist (READ: downer) I tend to think of life as a long road filled with disasters that you can see coming from far off – and then, there’s this turn… and you can’t see around that at all.
We are nearly to the turn.
Sometimes, not everything goes wrong.
Every year at the coming of Spring, we contemplate the fire season. We can’t see around that turn. Every year one of my nephews gains – happy birthday, Little E! – brings him closer to – or finally past – the age where another little boy was shot holding a pop gun or while backtalking or walking home or while looking like he was somehow dangerously unchild and suspicious and threatening to grown adults with guns. We can’t see around that turn. Sometimes not everything goes wrong, but it takes a tremendous amount of trust to keep walking this road.
past the turn, the hill rises
sun-kissed and ancient