Waking in our own house, in a country we no longer recognize

A wild hope

Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, after receiving the blow on her head that knocked her cold—after the tornado that seemed to come out of nowhere, threatening everything and everyone—we’ve woken in our own house in a country we no longer recognize.

How do we process this time?

I’m filled with foreboding: the future seems to already be here. Things will start happening—horrible things. They’re probably already happening now, in dark corners that aren’t seen. Cruelty and injustice, crimes against everyone and everything that’s most vulnerable. Unspeakable, unrepentant, institutionalized unfairness and brutality.

Our vaunted system of checks and balances has been destroyed, or will be in two months’ time. We’re hurtling down an icy slope, without brakes. Without skill. Without guardrails.

Maybe it’s only those of us, like me, who’ve lived in a kumbaya bubble of privileged idealism, who see it this way, as if seeing it for the first time. Maybe the racism and misogyny, the hatred, and the danger have been visible, all along, for all those who are most vulnerable, even here, in this place viewed by so much of the world (still!) as a paradise of plenty and opportunity, as a place where justice reigns supreme.

Fearing for the safety of one’s son is a fear that every Black mother in this country has always felt and now will feel even more.

I’m filled with fear for the son and grandsons of one of my chosen sisters, the sisters who have blessed my adult life with their love and friendship. I’m filled with fear for the family that holds me close despite my melanin-challenged skin.

Believe me, I know the fierceness of a mother’s love for her son—and I’m afraid for the sons of every person of color in this land.

I’m afraid for so many—for my dear friend who has mentored a DACA child for many years—a child, now an adult, who has become part of her family. Who could be rounded up and departed if the worst threats are carried out.

I fear for all my friends who will now be seen as the wrong kind of immigrants, who rightfully thought they’d earned the right to live out there lives here in safety.

My esteemed editor friend who has a trans daughter is in a panic, as she and her husband try to figure out how to scrape the funds together to get their daughter to a place of safety.

I fear for my other friends who have children and grandchildren who live outside gender norms, who look different or have special needs. Who need our protection.

I was once a 19-year-old who found herself pregnant and knew that the only correct thing to do was to get a legal abortion. It was sad and horrible, yes—and it was absolutely the correct thing to do. What of the teenagers now who have the rest of their lives, so full of potential, still before them? What of the doctors and nurses who must risk jail now to help them?

What of the women and girls who will die because the doctors and nurses are justifiably too afraid?

Who will be rounded up, at this dark juncture in history, and put in concentration camps? No one could believe that such things could happen in Germany, in the birthplace of so much high culture, intellectual and scientific achievement, until long after the evil was already unleashed: until they could no longer avoid seeing their neighbors marked and marginalized, dispossessed, beaten up on the streets in front of their homes. Dragged away, God knows where. Families torn apart. Their beautifully curated lives, the diligent work of years, destroyed.

There are two months to go and it’s too late to put the monster back in the box. The monstrousness that has been here all along has been unleashed. Fed its favorite food. Become even more puffed up with its own bitter sense of entitlement born of childhood grievances, or simply the result of a human being formed with a shrunken heart, without a moral compass—with an outsized sense of self that somehow, weirdly, empowers the selfishness of others.

There is a sameness to all of history’s worst villains. There is a blueprint of DNA that keeps showing up again, producing unrepentant men—they’re nearly always men—whose lust for power is as boundless as their seemingly unfathomable ability to suck otherwise good people into their wake, men and (I’m sad to say) women, too.

Photo by Eli Solitas on Unsplash

What are you doing to cope?

I am clinging to those I love and depend upon for comfort and meaning. My life-boat feels very small now, in this storm-tossed sea.

I’ve been writing poetry every morning—writing is my drug of choice and I’m grateful that my stash will not run out, as long as there’s breath in this body. As long as I can lift pen to paper or tap the keys of my computer.

How is it that experiencing the kind of possession that produces a poem can make one feel safe, at least for a little while?

I’m wondering if any of my new poems will ever be published—but does it matter?

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

I’ve avoided sharing my new poems here, because it makes them ineligible to be published as new work elsewhere, in places I’d like to see them published. Places that would be good for my resume as a poet who has some highly respected readers and even editors who love her work but has not yet managed to win the prize of a prestigious publisher for her first full-length book of poems.

This creates a Catch-22 for the writer who, after all, wants not only to sing, but also to have her voice heard. For the songs of her heart to reach other hearts. The writer for whom another person’s heartfelt response to her work is like the soothing touch of the Goddess on her forehead. A sign that what she is doing, what she is—despite all the struggle and uncertainty, the life-long episodes of self-doubt—is worthwhile.

A sign that she should stay hopeful until her own small life comes to an end. That she should persist in weaving the bright stars above her head into a gleaming tapestry of words.

Photo by Andrew Yurkiv on Unsplash

Just the draft of a poem scribbled this morning...

My words are as evanescent as the dance of dead leaves
falling through the air from the trees, taking as much time
as they can. Taking advantage of every complexity of the breeze
to swirl upward in a curlicue before surfing a wave
of gravity, then hopping off to twirl again in a gesture
both seductive and filled with grief.

Nothing lasts:
not the beauty of autumn leaves
or the tenderest words or this collection of bones
and flesh and sparkling neurons
that feels so much and sees the ground
coming ever closer and closer.
Senses the silence
that will soon
wash over her
 

I still haven’t figured out how to make your comments “show,” but I think you have to be on the SubStack App (it’s free) when you post your comments to my blog. They have been coming to me, as emails—for which I’m grateful. Forgive me, please, if I haven’t yet responded to something you’ve taken the trouble to write to me. My lack of organization is the likely culprit (and not any lack of love and gratitude for you).

When I named this SubStack, I had no idea how significant the name would be for me. Writing here has been, well and truly, a life-saver.

I’m sending you my love, gratitude, and blessings. Please send me yours!

The anthem of my childhood, “We Shall Overcome,” still plays in my head. A reader from South Africa told me last week that one could be jailed for singing it before Apartheid was banned there.

Light can come again to even the darkest places. It may not come again in my lifetime. But I’m filled with a wild hope that the babies of the people who are babies now will be able to live their lives on a healed planet, in a place filled with people who are loving and wise.

Make me generous and courageous. Let me give whatever I have in the service of making this world of ours a better place.