Over 5,400 immigrant children have been separated from their families and placed in detention camps or foster care for the crime of crossing a border. And the sun continues to freckle my daughter’s nose, and loosen the shoulders of my son.
A plaster Virgin Mary with her arms outstretched sits near a bird bath across the street. Every day I seek the poem in her gaze. Today I find nothing. No poem in any of this. I can’t find words unaccompanied by the knowledge of not doing enough.
I sink into Zagakewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”.
“You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.”
“You must praise the mutilated world,” Zagajewski says. I praise the ordinary dignities, the bits of life I’ve been given to live—”the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns.”
There is Matthew Zapruder: “I’m not sure I would say that poets have failed. For better and worse, we have been forced by horrifying and terrifying circumstance into feeling as if the only things that “matter” and are “worth writing about” have to do with generally agreed upon issues of importance. Of course we feel that way: just look at the world.”
I look at the world.
I look at the world in my head and how it differs from the world others experience.
I study the mutilations. The intimately-mutilated include those moments when my son’s rage at the world unmelts entire glaciers, the color of unpoured concrete, the apple core on the nightstand, an aubade for the calm of last week and that long night in bed with Audre Lorde, the look in his eyes across the room and the swell of desire, the fact that the look is still a hinge, a door he knows is open, a crack in the cosmos he recognizes.
A tear in the fabric of everything we know is re-cognizing of each other.
Try to find the beloved in a gun show stocking up on ammo. This is the most difficult space.
But there are other spaces as well. There is Shaindel Beers trying to help local pets find homes and bring comfort to those who are alone. There is Pidgeonholes, providing free online workshops for writers (and I’m so grateful to get to share one), and you won’t believe some of the generosity that is to come in that space. There are free online ebooks from Verso asking questions of the present moment. There are online literary happy hours with incredible readings. There is Reginald Dwayne Betts speaking directly into the silence of US prisons, where countless human beings are trapped in a vector where viruses thrive. There is unbelievable injustice alongside fear and desolation and hope. There is rumor and gossip and cruelty. There is humankind, for better or worse.