I paper my digital world with pictures:
scenery, people, food, and flowers—
color and shape and symmetry,
composition and order that
I often cannot find
in the daily news.
These are the fragments that make sense
amidst the discord that runs rampant—
these are the lovely things that war with
the shootings, the cruelties, the hate:
these pieces are what is true
and lasting and beautiful.
Hold them fast.
The fountain in my garden died.
The pump gave up its ghost
and I am faced with disassembly
of a 6-foot cement behemoth:
basin upon basin upon basin
containing nothing but last week's rain
which morphed into something
ghastly green and swamp-like.
This is the metaphor for my pandemic life: stalled,
silent, inoperable; ponderous
and immovable. I am dull and dry,
devoid of sparkle-- and, often
repetitive, repetitive, repetitive:
as stagnant and swampy as that looming garden colossus.
Imagine, however, a new medium: imagine,
if you can, from the depths of our dark pandemic well,
a reinvention, a purpose, a re-creation.
Plant one foot in pandemic, the other in the possible.
Imagine flowing flowers, streaming from that basin tower...
Plant them.
Imagine the eruption of art and poetry from this arid, too-quiet time...
Create them.
Imagine that time stood still for these several months
while we caught our breath,
while we found our footing,
while we found ourselves.
Imagine our lives... reimagined..
i have on my desk a year of blank pages:
so little worth recording.
A year of breakfast, lunch, and dinner
that marked the day in unremarkable segments.
A year of prowling through attic and basement,
sifting, discarding, noticing what had gone unnoticed.
A year of realization of what we had,
missing the everyday, missing people, missing faces.
We’ve lived that year in the uncertain gap
between reality and imagination,
between the evening news and
the awful possibilities that plagued our sleep.
Blank pages,
for who could write the story
of the missing, of the lonely, of the fearful times
we’ve had? Who could write
of what we learned about ourselves
and others while we were apart?
The sky is brush-stroked blue,
with streaks of golden morning.
India-inked trees stand
strategically placed to balance
the composition.
I am here again;
at the inception of a new year,
a chilly morning with a warming sky and
a hopeful new day
skimming across the river.
I am looking forward to the day
when I won’t need a scorecard to keep track
of the members of the cabinet, and their lack of qualifications;
and the prosecutors who resign
rather than answer to the revenge plans
of an untethered lunatic.
I’m waiting to wake up in the morning
without hearing that a new outrage
is dominating the headlines,
without a new constitutional crisis arising,
without an unspecified idiocy on the horizon.
I find that I am tired
of spineless politicians
who hold their political careers to be
more important than their constitutional obligations.
I am tired of lies. I am weary
of empty promises designed to provoke
cheers at super-spreader rallies; I am weary
of the stress and the fury and
the knot in my stomach
when the president appears on the news.
I can no longer bear the elevation of ignorance,
the disbelief in science; the promotion of hatred and violence,
the attacks on innocent people who are,
for the most part, just trying
to make it through as best they can.
What has happened to respect, to honor, to integrity?
Is compassion out of style?
Who are these pious zealots
who have forgotten the Golden Rule?
or just abbreviated it to “Do unto others”
and do it in the worst possible way.
I pray for your return, America.
I pray for the end of Trump, and all his yes-men,
and those who affirm his acts by their silence.
I pray for a new beginning.
There is something about a sunrise
that draws me to the river. I never tire
of the re-creation of the world that happens every day.
Dark clouds may hover, but gray becomes gilded
when the rose-gold sun envelops earth and sky
in morning light.
I take pictures,
the same scene, time and time and time again:
stark trees etched on a multi-colored sky,
stretching skyward near this golden river,
a trove of photos documenting the new day:
each daily renewal a reassuring album of hope.
It is a new day: a rainy one, and cold,
but the sun that hides beneath its cloud-blanket
(much as I do on days like this)
will show itself eventually--
when our tilted axis
twirls the earth to a warmer, brighter position,
Yet, while the sun moves on without me,
I too shall hide
until my own excuses are exhausted,
until the overwhelming tide recedes,
until I can negotiate the shifting sand
beneath my feet.
It has been too long a winter
with my axis angled away
from life and warmth and hope.
The time has come to turn
toward the light.
It is a new day.
