Category: NPM

“The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have been forced to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.” – Ursula LeGuin,The Dispossessed, 1974.

This feels vaguely wrong to say. Surely, one imagines, God will be the hand extended to our country now, in direst circumstance? But… no. The Divine has no hands but ours, to paraphrase the well-known phrase. If our hands aren’t and haven’t been extended to someone else, we surely shouldn’t be expecting an invisible reach to help to us. Of course, sometimes, miracles happen. Sometimes if you’ve fed leopards that were advertised as the face-eating sort, just sometime they don’t eat your face. Sometimes. But not often.

be-attitude

bankrupt
emptied of choice
we poor in spirit, blessed
with kingdoms far from here-and-now
don crowns

Some children are simply born to be adults. Their solemn miens and myriad questions mark them. They hang back, observe, and sometimes Make Statements of facts as they’ve observed them, which is frustrating when adults don’t take them seriously. Age is often their sole qualifier for childhood, as they are extraordinarily bad at grasping the skills necessary to navigate it successfully.

There are probably more of us enduring this moment than we know, mourning greatly the reminder that we promised ourselves a world we cannot possibly deliver.

back-to-back cinquain, untitled

“It’s out of my hands”
Pounds like a woodpecker’s beak
Sharp stabs on repeat:
We gave. Politicians gained.
We gave our power to fear –
Complicit silence followed.
We don’t grieve what we don’t love.
Do we love enough?
Love our neighbors as ourselves
Enough to stand up?

We’re packing again for our twentieth move – who knows what the neighbors will be like? What if they tidy their lawn with scissors, contemptuous of our easy relationship with dandelions? How loud is their music? On our morning walk, will they stop, baffled by black-with-white, and stare? Will the smoke we smell be of incense and ancestors or danker weeds? Will what flies over the fence be raised voices or bubbles on the breeze?

Will they be as polite of neighbors as Canada? Will anyone ever be?

crossings

intersectional
Means no one is an island
Our pain become yours
Like smoke drift from our fires
This trouble seeps past borders

Ours was not an easy faith. The Sunday churches, I believed, focused on fun things like coffee hour, incense, colored stoles or, fascinatingly, ellipses – God, after all, Was Still Speaking… We got stuck focusing on guilt and eschatology, a bulky box with awkward corners and no lack of obviousness. WE knew how the world would end. We were the ONLY ones who knew. They would turn on us, before it was over.

But first they came for the *Muslims.

WRONGFUL

Hiding their faces
Cold-hearted malignancy
Called it an arrest,
Claimed legal right to violence
Mute, we failed to even pray.

My third grade teacher read aloud to us daily, and more often than any other author we seemed to read Beverly Cleary. A writer from the state just next door, she was a neighbor whose books depicted similar West Coast lives. I wasn’t as big a fan of the older books featuring Otis and Ellen, or the animal books featuring Ralph and his motorcycle. I didn’t think much of Beezus, and Ramona, I felt, authored most of her own troubles, but Henry Huggins was just my speed. He and his dog and his paper route seemed like they led a charmed life, one that I could imagine having. I dearly loved Cleary’s older books that portrayed an idealized 1950’s world where a corsage and a dance or a boy were the most important things. No matter the era she wrote was in, everything seemed so very clean and good on Klickitat Street, a street where all quarrels were solved and even mischievous childrens’ comeuppance wasn’t so very hard to bear.

Ironic that Klickitat Street in Oregon is named after the Chinookan people whose name means “beyond“.

beyond Beverly’s street

Strubie in late 2021 was a round-headed four month old. Perfect, solid and placid, he was happy to sit and stare at my unScottishly dark skin, making fat-fisted, uncoordinated attempts at my tantalizing dangle earrings. Devoid of board books in the holiday house, I whispered the words to GOOD NIGHT MOON into his little elfin ear, unsurprised that the words came unprompted (although his parents were well impressed). Ironic, as it’s a book I’ve always disliked, especially the garish cover palette. Isn’t that the way it goes with things that bug us? Songs that we hate we can reproduce, pitch-perfect. This surreal bomb of green, yellow, and red has seared itself into the American consciousness as a classic, with its supposed-to-be-sleepy bunny glowering out from the page, vanishing socks, the cryptic old lady, congealed mush and an ominous… “Nobody.” GOOD NIGHT MOON is the weirdest little beast of a book, but I’m already planning to get the commemorative postage stamps. This book will never not going to remind me of a perfect, round-headed baby, born at the first light after a long, dark time.

Struan

time is a river
though no two thaws flood the same
mud season arrives
slick and cold. inconvenient
proof of life after life. hope

I was obsessed with diseases as a child. I read extensively about polio because it was A Terrible Thing that happened to so many children AND a president…. and I was terrified by the ranks of iron lungs in old Life magazine images, fearing they would come back in vogue, as treatment for… something, and I’d be trapped in one for years. I memorized the symptoms for typhoid as described by Catherine Marshall in CHRISTY, because fictional interactions with disease was apparently also acceptable. I was mildly interested in Typhoid Mary, but fascinated by Jacob Riis, and Jane Hull who lifted children out of desperate circumstance. Children can become oddly fixated on disaster and destruction sometimes. My readings on child welfare and the shaky beginnings of a nation deciding that perhaps the children of the poor should also be granted a childhood instead of being bred for endless work clash painfully today against the plummeting working age in some states, and the climbing number of measles deaths in others. Somewhere, someone voted and decided that child welfare didn’t need to treat anyone well.

the smallest always pay the price

Will anyone admit they voted for this
And decided, “Sow chaos,’cause we can!”
Now whispering “Whaaaat?” or ‘How could this happen?’
Is pointlessly past tense, and done when anywhere,
Everywhere in the rot creeps. Ready or not
our dominoes fall. Change sweeps up everything,
true – but this breaking is
brutal and once again, children are lost.

Tax day is coming – the day my inlaws got married, to save money, they told their children, though I don’t know how that worked. Ironic, that every April I remember them when I think about them no other day (I “took” their son; they don’t forgive this). Annually at my house, we set aside our cash to ‘give the devil his due,’ and that’s the day these giddily unromantic people chose to commemorate their union. Nothing more inevitable than death and taxes. Nothing more American than tax dodgers, fraudsters, and the like, avoiding payment for the benefit of paved roads and postal services. Silver linings, I guess, to commit to the greatest fraud of all on the day you dole out your coin, the day you return on your investment in infrastructure, a time you promise to add another pair of bricks to the foundation of the world: one called love and the other, honor.

taxing

Foundational form
this infrastructure holds us
Upright. Embodied.
Our checks, balances and spines
Keep heart and soul in tune.