Getting in the Christmas Spirit by Lynn Ungar

December 15, 2016

I suspect that I am far from the only one having a hard time getting in the Christmas spirit these days. It’s hard to feel all ho-ho-ho when the news is full of the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Aleppo and a string of outrageous and appalling appointments from a president-elect who was voted in under the auspices of a foreign power.

On the other hand, there is something in my little Jewish-UU heart that is reaching out toward Christmas this year. The story of Mary and Joseph traveling because they had to sign themselves onto a government registry. The story of the couple looking for shelter in their time of greatest need. The story of a fragile king who ordered the slaughter of innocents because he couldn’t handle the prospect of a threat to his own power. The story which imagines the nature of the new-born king to be something so different from the despotic Herod that even now we have a hard time imagining what sort of a king could align himself with the poor and the outcast, insisting that power means something utterly unlike the kind of power that the crowned kings tried to grab and maintain at all cost.

I’m not doing well with Santa and jingle bells and presents under the tree, but I might just find my way into the Christmas spirit of a little family finding warmth and comfort in with the friendly beasts. I am trying to work my way eventually to the Christmas spirit of the Wise Men, who trusted that there was something out there—although they didn’t know exactly what—that was worth looking for. Who didn’t really get that this was a totally different kind of king, and brought him presents fit for the kind of king that they understood, but who didn’t walk off in disgust and bewilderment when what they had sought for so long turned out to be a baby, with the kind of power that babies have, not the power of kings.

I don’t know that I will get there, but what I am hoping for, what I am aiming toward, is the Christmas spirit of the shepherds, who have always been my favorite part of the story—partly because I have always found it hilarious. I mean really. Here are ordinary guys doing the most ordinary things, just out on the job, keeping an eye on what needs to be watched. And suddenly the sky is full of angels, and Luke tells us right in the text that they were terrified. Who wouldn’t be? It’s all completely absurd and unbelievable and no one in their right mind (which neither the shepherds nor the sheep probably were in under the circumstances) would have the faintest idea how to respond. Any reasonable person would conclude that the sky was falling and hunker down. But these guys, these plain, extraordinary guys, get their sheep together and go out to look for a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths.

Think about that for a minute. Swaddling cloths are what everybody those days wrapped their babies in. It’s like saying “You will know for a sign when you see a baby in a onesie.” But these dudes were like, “OK, sure, fine. Let’s go see what they’re talking about.” I love that. Also, I am so not there. Not yet. But I think maybe that’s the Christmas spirit I’m looking for. The spirit that in the face of terror and confusion is willing to entertain the possibility that wonder could be in the mix as well. The spirit that is willing to be amazed, and curious and brave enough to say “Let’s go see,” even when the instructions aren’t very clear and you don’t know the road.

Let’s go see. Let’s go see together.

"Time Is a Child Playing" by Richard Lewis

It's summer. School is out. The streets and the parks of New York City have begun to change. Fire hydrants are opened; swimming pools are filled; drinking fountains begin to overflow--and in playgrounds throughout the warming city, sprinklers shower into the air.

For the lucky child a daily visit to one of these sprinklers is not only a way to cool off--it is to challenge the great leaps and boundings of this watery paradise. Some children, too excited to change their clothes, simply dive in, running through the spray until they are soaking wet. Others, in bathing suits, cautiously approach the surging waters and with their empty hands reach out to feel how strong or how cold this oldest of the elements might be. Like sand pipers, the children dart in and out of the sprinkler's splaying waters, constantly inventing ways to outwit its fluid movements. They squirm and hop, they jump and kick, and then suddenly, as if in prayer, they stop in the middle of a large plume of falling water and, looking up, serenely drink in every moment of its playful wetness.

Sitting on a bench nearby, I feel envious that I cannot take part in their abandon, their rightful enthusiasm in being a player with the play of water itself. If William Blake is correct and "Energy is Eternal Delight," then what I see is a field of energy, a field of playing in which these children have let go of our all-too-human constraints. They have become, each in their own way, partners in the play of liquid forces that make these waters alive. Perhaps this interplay of the human and the surrounding elements is part of the genius of childhood. To run with the wind, to play with the sand, to play with water are not merely idle statements of language, but real descriptions of what a child does when he or she encounters these properties. Through this profound gesture of our playing, we enter the life of the wind, sand, and water--or as one eight-year-old, Johnny, recently wrote, "When I am playing I feel like hugging the wind and kissing and singing with the air, pushing the air far away. I am very, very happy."

Good Bones (poem) by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use (poem) by Ada Limón

All these great barns out here in the outskirts, 
black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.
They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.
You say they look like arks after the sea’s
dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,
and I think of that walk in the valley where
J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,
its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name
though we knew they were really just clouds—
disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

On Disappearing (poem) by Major Jackson

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I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is
full of my thinking. An archbishop
prays for my soul, even though
we met only once, and even then, he was
busy waving at a congregation.
The ticking clocks in Vermont sway

back and forth as though sweeping
up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors,
and what comes up are the great paragraphs
of dust, which also carry motes
of my existence. I have not disappeared.
My wife quivers inside a kiss.
My pulse was given to her many times,

in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip
in olive oil is communion with our ancestors,
who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs
I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have
given me freedom which is a crater
I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves
of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs,

a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic,
makes me appear to those who think I've
disappeared. It's too bad war makes people
disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons
turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade
into the mountains on a forest trail,
I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade
turns my arms and legs into branches of oak.
It is then I belong to a southerly wind,
which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back
and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just
lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared.

In my children, I see my bulging face
pressing further into the mysteries.

In a library in Tucson, on a plane above
Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns
a controlled fire, I am held by a professor,
a general, and a photographer.
One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs
the scented pages of my books, scouring
for the bitter smell of control.
I hold him in my mind like a chalice.
I have not disappeared. I swish the amber
hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling
rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers.

When we talk about limits, we disappear.
In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel.

I am a life in sacred language.
Termites toil over a grave,
and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays.
At a glance from across the room, I wear
September on my face,
which is eternal, and does not disappear
even if you close your eyes once and for all
simultaneously like two coffins.

Choice (poem) by Lynn Ungar

There isn’t a right answer.
There just isn’t. The game show
where the bells ring and the points
go up and the confetti falls
because you got the answer
is a lie. The preacher who would assure you
of how to attain salvation
is making it all up. The doctor
who knows just how to fix
what ails you will be sure
of something else tomorrow.
Every choice will
wound someone, heal someone,
build a wall and open a conversation.
Things will always happen
that you can’t foresee.
But you have to choose.
It’s all we have—that little rudder
that we employ in the midst
of all the eddies and rapids,
the current that pulls us
inexorably toward the sea.
The fact that you are swept along
by the river is no excuse.
Watch where you are going.
Lean in toward what you love.
When in doubt, tell the truth.

Love After Love - Derek Walcott

The time will come 
when, with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror 
and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored 
for another, who knows you by heart. 
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 
peel your own image from the mirror. 
Sit. Feast on your life.

"Saint Francis and the Sow" (poem) by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

The Soul's Desert - Robinson Jeffers

They are warming up the old horrors, and all that they 

     say is echoes of echoes.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little jour-

     nalists, but the governments
Of the great nations; men favorably
Representative of massed humanity. Observe them.
    Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own
     soul's desert
And look for God—having seen man.

Cottonwoods (poem) by Lynn Ungar

The cottonwoods are
flinging themselves outward,
filling the air with spiraling flurries,
covering lawns in deepening drifts.
You could not call this generosity.
Like any being, they
let loose what they have
in order to survive,
in order that their lives might continue
in a new year's growth.
The more seeds they send out
on their lofted journeys
the greater the chance
for their kind to flourish.
There is no hesitation.
No one asks how much
they will give. Without words
they know so clearly
that everything depends
on what we call giving,
that which the world knows only as creation.

"Blessing the Bread" (poem) by Lynn Ungar

Surely the earth
is heavy with this rhythm,
the stretch and pull of bread,
the folding in and folding in
across the palms, as if
the lines of my hands could chart
a map across the dough,
mold flour and water into
the crosshatchings of my life.

I do not believe in palmistry,
but I study my hands for promises
when on one is around.
I do not believe in magic.
But I probe the dough
for signs of life, williing
it to rise, to take shape,
to feed me. I do not believe
in palmistry, in magic, but
something happens in kneading
dough or massaging flesh;
an imprint of the hand remains
on the bodies we have touched.

This is the lifeline--
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
making the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.

Boundaries (poem) by Lynn Ungar

The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?

You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless nor ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?

Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing as they dance?

One Art - Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent 

to be lost that their loss is no disaster. 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 

places, and names, and where it was you meant 

to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or 

next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 

the art of losing’s not too hard to master 

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff (poem) by Adrienne Rich

The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
seems to last longer than it should
or maybe I'm using it to the thin edge.
The moon rolls in the air. I didn't want this child.
You're the only one I've told.
I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.
Otto has a calm, complacent way
of following me with his eyes, as if to say
Soon you'll have your hands full!
And yes, I will; this child will be mine
not his, the failures, if I fail
will all be mine. We're not good, Clara,
at learning to prevent these things,
and once we have a child it is ours.
But lately I feel beyond Otto or anyone.
I know now the kind of work I have to do.
It takes such energy! I have the feeling I'm
moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,
in my loneliness. I'm looking everywhere in nature
for new forms, old forms in new places,
the planes of an antique mouth, let's say, among the leaves.
I know and do not know
what I am searching for.
Remember those months in the studio together,
you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,
I trying to make something of the strange impressions
assailing me--the Japanese
flowers and birds on silk, the drunks
sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light,
those faces...Did we know exactly
why we were there? Paris unnerved you,
you found it too much, yet you went on
with your work...and later we met there again,
both married then, and I thought you and Rilke
both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness
between you. Of course he and I
have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous
of him, to begin with, taking you from me,
maybe I married Otto to fill up
my loneliness for you.
Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,
he believes in women. But he feeds on us,
like all of them. His whole life, his art
is protected by women. Which of us could say that?
Which of us, Clara, hasn't had to take that leap
out beyond our being women
to save our work? or is it to save ourselves?
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn't paint or speak or even move.
My child--I think--survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem--
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn't say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don't I dream of you?
That photo of the two of us--I have it still,
you and I looking hard into each other
and my painting behind us. How we used to work
side by side! And how I've worked since then
trying to create according to our plan
that we'd bring, against all odds, our full power
to every subject. Hold back nothing
because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies
in the things we used to talk about:
how life and death take one another's hands,
the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt.
And now I feel dawn and the coming day.
I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures
come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel
it is myself that kicks inside me,
myself I must give suck to, love...
I wish we could have done this for each other
all our lives, but we can't...
They say a pregnant woman
dreams her own death. But life and death
take one another's hands. Clara, I feel so full
of work, the life I see ahead, and love
for you, who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say.

From an Atlas of the Difficult World (Poem) by Adrienne Rich

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

Fast Gas By DORIANNE LAUX

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            for Richard

Before the days of self service,
when you never had to pump your own gas,
I was the one who did it for you, the girl
who stepped out at the sound of a bell
with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back
in a straight, unlovely ponytail.
This was before automatic shut-offs
and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,
I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas
backed up, came arcing out of the hole
in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts,

belly and legs. And I had to hurry

back to the booth, the small employee bathroom

with the broken lock, to change my uniform,

peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin

and wash myself in the sink.

Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt

pure and amazed — the way the amber gas

glazed my flesh, the searing,

subterranean pain of it, how my skin

shimmered and ached, glowed

like rainbowed oil on the pavement.

I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,

for the first time, in love, that man waiting

patiently in my future like a red leaf

on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty

that asks to be noticed. How was I to know

it would begin this way: every cell of my body

burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me

a nimbus of light that would carry me

through the days, how when he found me,

weeks later, he would find me like that,

an ordinary woman who could rise

in flame, all he would have to do

is come close and touch me.

Dorianne Laux, "Fast Gas" from What We Carry. Copyright © 1994 by Dorianne Laux. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.


Source: What We Carry (BOA Editions Ltd., 1994)

Post-Rodham Depression

Donald Trump was elected America's president. Donald the dumb, the racist, the sexist, the king bloviator, the tantrum totalitarian.

I knew America was racists and sexist and skeptical of education and nuance. I've seen it work against me as a professional in a profession that's all about nuance.

But I wasn't ready for this. I thought more of us stood on the side of acceptance and of striving to be better and know more and do more for each other and for ourselves.

I am sad and angry and confused.  I think it was a Washington Post article by a University of Wisconsin professor that explained Trump's win as a lash-out from rural America that sees all the power and money and voice shifting to cities. As a planner, I should have thought about that.  I didn't.

Because my education also makes me aware of a vast constellation of factors converging to make that the new reality, and none of them impacted in a positive way -- in fact only in the most undesirable ways -- by a Trump presidency.  I only see his leadership working out well for other brainless billionaires and for white supremacists.

And my fear and anger at empowering Trump's hatred and ignorance has completely overshadowed my sorrow for Hillary.  I wasn't her biggest fan.  I, too, lost sight of her accomplishments and her incredible competence because of media reporting.  I let her husband's slimy behavior overshadow my opinon of her as a woman in her own right because she seemed to have made a calculated political move to stand by him to consolidate their power and influence -- stronger together, as it were.  I judged her as a wife and still wish she would have divorced him when the worst was known.  But I recognize and admit that I know nothing about their relationship or their marriage or their partnership.  And I recognize and dislike that my instinct to judge another woman for her behavior with her man led me to overlook the solidarity we have -- should always have -- as women.

I'm enormously sad for Hillary.  And all the little girls who were ready to see in her presidency a symbol of their own worth and potential for leadership.  I love hearing about how much Hillary was respected by her staffers and colleagues.  I'm interested in what she will do now.

I wish I could write her a thank you note for standing up for us.  For her years of leadership.  For her strength and smarts and steel.  She will forever remind me to be a better woman, a better person, and a better American. Stronger together.  All the way.

Within the past two weeks, I seem to have hit my limit as a professional and then today as a mother.  Having taken on a task that posed so many challenges that I have grown into with power, if not always grace, running at full tilt for over a year has taken its toll, and this week, I fell down sick and stayed there for days.  Got up very very very behind in the race to finish before the political landscape changes and the aligned stars are replaced with less supportive or more petty lights.

And today, I missed my girl's first time on a bike, off at work to try to catch up on filling the financial hole that we are digging ourselves out of, having bought a new house to give each kid a room.  By the time I got home in the evening and went out for a family bike ride, it was her second time - old hat.  She breezed onto the bike, and I felt the breath of mother-need knocked out of me.  Only to feel the weight of it crash back onto my chest when she dissolved into somewhat hysterical tears almost immediately when she got too close to the middle of the street.

We rode three blocks to a park. She fell once.  She must have cried 4 times.  When we got to the park, there were more hysterical sobs, and I found myself watching her almost as though I was out-of-body, as though she were a stranger and no one who I had any idea how to help.  There's the start of a new learning curve!  Like the swirl of yellow bricks that start a nightmare journey in a world suddenly in vivi-color, if not rational on any level, there it is.  Where she's not just my kid anymore but this bundle of self-referential anxieties that have very little to do with me. That I have very little power to dispel or untangle.  And I only just barely rose to the occasion, making it about learning a new skill, being patient with herself, looking for the fun.  And when she finally laughed, smiled, found a bit of fun, I kissed her cheek, told her I was proud of her.  That I was the most proud that she had calmed herself down and relaxed into fun.  I'm proud of both of us.

Honesty Is the Wildness of the Sea -- V.B. Price

(excerpted and transcribed from this reading)

Only you, for me –

The warmth of your mind,

The breezes your courage attracts –

Only you and I together relieve the fever from the streets of hate,

Stretched out on our bodies like myths sunbathing in the glades.

Only we, together, know each other all alone.

We speak to each other as if we were the sea.

Anything can be said to the ocean.

Without the slightest fear

And the ocean hears.

Imagine, being comprehended by the sea.

Imagine.

It is this we know between us.

Gospel Salt - Andrea Gibson

Sometimes I get so nervous when I speak
I can feel my heartbeat in my tongue.
And my heartbeat talks faster than an auctioneer,
but this is the last place
I would ever try to sell something from.

When I get really scared
I imagine my enormous grandmother
is standing behind me
with her pipe-organ arms
hugged tight around my chest.
She says, “Listen, I know you’re running your mouth
so your mind can rest.”

Now rest

is no broken levy staring up at the water.
It is the bite marks a mother left on the hurricane
while her daughter climbed to the 9th ward rooftop
to spray paint, “We are still here, y’all.”

Yes we are.

While some days we may barely get our feet wet
most of the time we’re gonna have to wake
and shake the tidal wave off our etch-a-sketch
to make space for the notes
of a brass-knuckled saxophone
carrying the tattered hope
of the ocean’s prayer.
All these words
are just paper boats praying they can get there.

Tell me we will get there
before we come up broke,
believing that people, like levies,
have to hold themselves together
when often it’s our falling apart
that gives us the grace,
that makes sure no one ever
builds a condo over our broken open hearts.

Two years after Katrina
I found a sea shell
beneath an oak tree in New Orleans City Park.
I can still hold it to my ear
and hear the song the folk singer sang
that night she left so much blood on her guitar strings
and I knew I have never been touched right,
knew we could be instruments
if we could just let our kite strings
get tuned to the lightning tonight.

Tuned to your thunder.
I am already shaking like a matador’s hands shook
in that 1906 California earthquake
when 28,000 buildings fell
and the people said, “When 28,000 buildings fall
do you know how many walls are no longer there?”

All they had left between them
was the gospel salt of their sweat,
as they carried each other from the rubble to the street
where each night they carried the piano
to be played by a new refugee.

Some wishes can only be made on the stars’ dust.
I know most of the time my shine
cannot hold a match to my rust.
So ask me about the rain.
I will tell you my mother says, “The thing
about wheelchairs is they keep you looking up.”
Says, “Forests may be gorgeous
but there’s nothing more alive than a tree
that learns how to grow in a cemetery.”
So when my grandmother died
I started wearing her thimbles on my fingers
when I’d type these poems,
hoping every key I’d type
would sound like a footstep of someone coming home,
the way my friend came home from Iraq
and named his baby daughter Viva.

We have all fought for our lives
more than we know,
survived our own questions.
How can you grieve a poisoned sea, a bleeding gulf?
Can even the moon handle that kind of gravity,
that pull to surrender?
I say science can split an atom.
But what if Eve could put Adam back together
by reminding him the garden is just a seed
sometimes so small it can fit on the tip of your tongue?

Say, “flint.”
Say, “spark.”
See, this is me hitchhiking with a green thumb,
hoping to grow something in the trust
of letting y’all pick me up
‘cause today, trust me, I was falling for the wreckage.

So remind me
the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.
Plant my feet in the one thing that flowered
when everything else erupted. Usman,
an immigrant from Pakistan,
could not stop saying, “Brother, Brother,”
to the Jewish man whose hand he held
down ninety-eight flights of stairs
to escape the fall of the Twin Towers.

Right now, that is the only hour I will set my heart to.
The moment we realize sometimes
it is the metal in the wind chimes that reminds us
how soft the breeze is.

And maybe my grandmother only believed in Jesus
‘cause she believed He came back
wearing that whip on his back like a halo.

Either way, this world
has picked me enough times for its madness vase
for me to know sanity is not
running from the window when the lightning comes.

It’s turning thunder into grace,
knowing sometimes the break in your heart
is like the hole in the flute.

Sometimes it’s the place
where the music comes through.

[Performance by Hakim Bellamy, Angela Herrera, and Mikaela Renz-Whitmore starts at minute 17:17]