Earl Grey Morning
Even the name of it soothes.
the violet soft of it,
purled, curling stir of it,
rising through cold
like a promise.
From dark there is dawn --
first fog, then a song.
And even the sense of it soothes.
The cupped balmy breath of it,
pressed against palm of it,
steeping the dark
like an oath.
From warmth will come glow –
soft first and soft-slow.
Easy, the taste of it soothes.
The deep woodsy heft of it,
rich malted zest of it,
breaking the black
like a vow.
From dark will come light,
cool bergamot bright.
So, for now, just feel
for the sunrise,
the wayfinding blessings
are always unwinding and
binding themselves
like a pact.
Find fragrance in the dark.
Seize promise.
Feel the spark.
The house, cozy at dawn, and me in my bathrobe and soft Santa socks, Christmas lights glowing, playlist carols going… sipping my coffee and sorting my thoughts,
How lucky am I, I think — no, I know. How blessed to be snuggled beneath a warm velvet throw in the crook of a sectional with my laptop and nowhere to go while watching the sky shift to silver at dawn.
How simple, how sumptuous — an extravagance, bar none –that not everyone has. To have a sanguine soul in a world that exsanguinates souls. My gratitude is great. My cup overflows.
My sons are nestled all snug in their beds and my girls grown and glowing in orbits they threaded and hung on their own, weaving constellations that tell their tales, cast shimmering trails of goodness and grace.
While the boys, on the cusp of their own greatness, silver their way toward their own dawns, stars blooming bright on their baby cheeks and burgeoning lives, and the sky’s (no the universe) is their limit too, destinies unspooling just like their sisters’,, but entirely their own.
I celebrate all their stories, all their tangled strands of light unwound from my body, ever unwinding and widening, bright and brighter still, stringing their gifts like drops of Jupiter, like sun-wrangled, star-spangled miracle-bringers of goodwill and good trouble in this dark world.
There is no greater joy, no greater comfort for a mother’s heart than to see the babies she brought into this world out there in it, slaying and making spirits bright — hers most especially.
They come in threes, they say. Bad things come in threes. And sure
enough, bad tidings rode in on their serrated fonts in swirling
impatient portals: an unholy trinity of cyst, malignancy and mass.
One slung sideways, like a fanny pack across a kidney sack, a second,
mortared to wind pipe, spewing ash into places unknown, a third sucking
marrow from mammary glands like a motherfucker. Unsanctified settlers,
all. Mother of all that is Holy, who let in the false prophet, the devil, the
beast to cast rings around x-rays and pockets full of poison, ashen shadows
on MRI scans? All that rot and stink and bile planted like rancid Easter eggs,
tangled spiders’ nests, like hissing snakes in sacred sanctuaries… Such blatant
blasphemy. Such sick sacrilege. But then, while bad things come in threes, so
too, do good. And we believe in the Good — that Triumvirate of Truth: Faith
and Hope and Love. And the greatest of these is Love. Love lends strength and
courage to fight. When we harness for God the energies of love, then love will
help conquer all. Together, we’ll banish the bad for Good. Even the dirty, rotten C word.
(and for all our schools)
So much depends
upon
a brown door,
hollow,
framed with glass
windows,
between the gun &
children
It’s not enough.
Do something.
Sincerely,
Heather Peters Candela Teacher and Parent
Juneteenth is an important day in America’s history, not only for ancestors of enslaved people to celebrate emancipation, but as a reminder for the rest of us that it hasn’t always been about freedom and justice for all in this country…
and to warn us that unless we understand and own our country’s past injustices, we might get there again.
A date on a calendar is not enough to ensure we don’t. A “Happy Juneteenth” is not enough.
Maybe the best way is to walk a mile in the shoes of those who’ve been there. Read or watch or visit places that tell their stories. Hear and understand.
This book. This one in my picture. Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward. The title is a line from Dante’s Inferno where Virgil becomes Dante’s tour guide through hell – and that is what this book will do for you.
It will take you on a tour through an enslaved woman’s hell. You will inhabit the mind and body of Annis. You will feel her pain, her hunger, her suffering, her horrors.
It’s hard reading. Brutal.
But imagine living it.
Juneteenth deserves to be recognized. But even more, it deserves to be understood.
She slips into her fuzzy bathrobe with all the sleep-rimmed focus of cream unfurling in coffee. Eyes but slits, she stirs the marble mist. Shadows spin and settle; shrubbery and tree line appear. Lawn purls silver-sage, and the yearling slips from his bed to graze at the sod-scalloped hem between clearing and wood. A roll of her perfumed wrist and his coat froths cappuccino; the dogwoods don lemon lime skirts. Onward she shuffles now, gathering steam. Wiping her eyes: the limbs limn tears. Flexing her toes: the moss fuzzes stone. The yearling cocks his head to the arched swirl of undergrowth, an almost-cave of wonder and wild behind him. The sun-sprinkled lawn, bustling and bursting with civilized snacks, in front. Inward or out? he ponders in pause. Meanwhile, sliding off her slipper and sash,
Dawn lifts gold arms
to comb back the last clinging
haze from her crown.
I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling
— Isaiah 51:22
Our minds are not yours
to have your way with.
No, not our bodies either.
Keep your key to our lives
and achievements to yourself.
You are no master of ours.
Still, you come to us with longing
and unsolicited advice:
Let down your hair and your goals
and your dangerous gender ideologies.
Be your husband’s pride and joy,
of less daring — more noble — character.
More for less.
You want us smaller
(the little woman
cowered under
Adam’s rib).
YOU COWARD.
You want our riches, but not our power.
Our diamonds, coal, cherries, oil.
You want to strip us, nail us, crush us,
pillage, plunder, f**k us.
Well f**k that.
Our world is not your oyster.
You cannot plumb our depths.
And because we will not let you,
you’re hellbent to pry the lock
and nail us to the cross you claim
we’re destined to bear ‘til kingdom come.
Your kingdom.
But how’s that old parable go?
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
followed by horse, rider, battle, and kingdom…
There’s a proverb for you.
You want us trembling?
We’ll give you the very cup of trembling.
I expected to feel less than whole. To mourn my uterus, to miss the procreant cradle where my babies rocked until I rolled them out and raised them up. To perhaps feel like I’m missing what makes me a woman. But that’s not what I felt.
I’ve felt missing completely. Lost in a head full of white static, my body lost in post-anesthetic cotton batting. Muffled thoughts floating in half-dreams and white-sheet other-worlds opened by robotic arms and pain-numbing canister snaps. So disconnected. So dejected. Missing parts and missing people. Body blue and punctured, matching my mood.
I also didn’t expect the exhaustion. Weights hooked and hanging at the end of my limbs, the start of my thoughts. Everything sluggish and sidelined. Everything empty. I shed a lot of tears. Felt sorry for myself. Felt forgotten and alone.
But that was far from the truth — was all the fallacy of post-surgical funk. Because I have had so many people rally around me and my family. So many people shower us with love. So many meals delivered, texts sent, pickups and drop offs completed, prayers spoken. I grow weepy (with gratitude this time) just thinking about it.
And today, the cobwebs and cotton batting are limned in a see-through-the-murky-to-better-days brightness. I feel like I’m closer to the other side now – the side where my family is, my friends are, where energy pours like sunshine and waterfalls. It’s shimmering there in the haze like the northern lights I missed the weekend of my surgery. The shine is returning. I’m nearly there.
And it’s all thanks to a little help from my friends, my family, my people, my village.
Picture this… Mothers and Daughters
Their procreative powers celebrated and valued
Along with
Their minds and voices, acknowledged and revered
— whether child-bearing, child-rearing, bread-winning, globe-setting or game-changing.
Women, not relegated to house and home, but women, free to regulate themselves.
Free to roam.
It could happen. It still could.
Picture so many women, Mothers and Daughters,
set to tell their stories. Mothers and Daughters
with stories like mine and hers and theirs.
Stories ready to be sung out, loud and proud.
Ready to upset the maelstrom of men and their spheres of control,
their spears of control,
manipulating stories.
controlling bodies,
codifying minds.
Women set to tell their stories unhobbled by laws, unhanged with stigma, unsacrificed on altars, no longer denigrated and diminished.
Picture Mothers and Daughters unlabeled.
Unlabeled as virgins, ladies, cock-teases, cougars, sluts, spinsters, trophy wives, whores, hags. Frigid or loose. Nasty or pure.
Unlabeled. Unhysterical, Unfat, Unskinny, Unugly, Unhot.
Unused and Unabused.
But no longer UnSung. Singing so many stories.
It could happen. It will.
That’s where me and my kind come in. The writers, the poets, the instigators.
The storytellers.
We play a fundamental role in the histories of Her Stories.
We keep the home fires burning,
Fostering and fueling far more than fires in hearths.
Feeding fires in hearts.
Encouraging stargazing, fire eating, and drops of Jupiter in our hair.
It’s in our dna, and has been, since the wheel first whetted the knife. Caves first oxidized hands.
And we’ll keep doing it until the reach of our arms and the span of our hips, and the stride of our steps no longer fits the limits of their boxes.
Until our potential is so great, vibrates so powerfully, wells and swells so phenomenally, that their spheres all burst and new worlds are all birthed, new galaxies unfold…
And we all find a place.
Our place –
– for ourselves and our daughters.
Until then.
Football gives me chills. And chest tightness. And tachycardia. And tremors. And hypotension. And breathlessness. And Fatigue. But it’s all good. I promise.
Let me explain…
Yesterday, just after 1:00 PM, I kissed my husband goodbye and watched him head off to the football war room, a scenario we’ve repeated every Sunday afternoon since early August. He strolled purposely down our sidewalk, his bag full of notes on this week’s opposing team’s tendencies slung over his shoulder.As I watched him leave, my chest tightened with pride. It’s Week Two of Georgia High School playoffs. The competition is getting fiercer, so Mike and his fellow defensive coaches burned the midnight oil preparing their game plan.
It’s a mysterious process to me, the deconstruction of an offense. In my fiercely romantic brain, I imagine it’s an exposition closely akin to the annotation and explication of metaphysical poetry. I picture the guys huddled around their Hudl screens, marking up schemes with dexterity and determination, scrutinizing pistol formations and pondering triple options with the same respect and gritty fortitude that I scrutinize syntax and ponder paradox, searching for the key to decipher the cryptic code and whittle it down into chewable chunks.
I’m sure it’s a formidable feat, arduous and time-consuming; always open to interpretation; and painfully exquisite– if that’s your thing. And it is absolutely, positively my guy’s thing. For the past decade, I’ve watched him light up like a Hurricane scoreboard when he talks shop with fellow coaches. Football powwows with people in the know is one of his most intense pleasures. And I love that he’s found his niche within this fine group of coaching fellows. Perhaps I’m biased, but I truly believe they may be the most amazingly gifted and gracious crew ever to be assembled in the history of high school football.
Watching them from the stands as they interact with their players on Friday nights, tremors of excitement run up and down my spine. It starts with pregame. I love seeing the boys clustered around their position coaches, going through their drills. The bursts of whistle and muscle; the blur of footballs and footwork; the thud of shoulder pads and practice punts. Pregame gives me shivers.
And then there is the moment at the beginning of every game, just prior to kick off, when the boys and their coaches march evenly out across half the field and kneel. One-hundred-twenty-plus boys of one-hundred-fifty-plus pounds – they all take a knee and give the Lord a moment of silence and respect.
It leaves me breathless.
Then the world speeds back up again. The crowds gather; the cheerleaders chant; the bands play; the lights hum; and the stadium pulses. But just before it all goes down, just before the band plays Amazing Grace and The Star-Spangled Banner, just before the team runs through the tunnel of swirling white smoke and takes the field, just before the scoreboard sounds off and the place kicker blasts off, Mike climbs the stadium steps on his way to the box. And he always stops off to deliver a kiss to me and our boys. Seeing him approach, his chocolate eyes smiling, his caramel skin glowing, his wide, warm shoulders swaying, my heart swells and my knees go weak. I am truly a blessed woman.
Yes, Friday nights give me goosebumps. Good old-fashioned, puckered-up chicken skin. And not because I’m lucky enough to get a pre-game kiss from a tall mug of coaching caramel macchiato. (Although that helps, too.) But because boy, can our boys play some ball. And man, can our men coach ‘em up. There is nothing like a good, crisp, spiral-sliced Friday night.
And now we’ve been blessed with a second week in our playoff run. And I’m praying for another three after this. Another three-and-a-half weeks of single parenthood and lonely bedtimes. The boys and I have this routine down pat. It’s old hat. And we’re in it for the long haul.
So here’s hoping and praying for another four weeks of Sunday War Rooms, Chili Night Wednesday Nights, Friday Night Lights and everything in between. I’m ready for the run. My heart can take it. My body is addicted to the thrilling, physiological effects of really good football. And it’s all good.
Our Real Modern Family
I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while now… I guess ever since we decided to bake up a couple of twins from scratch using borrowed eggs and my forty-seven- year-old oven. My daughter once called us the “Real Modern Family” – and you know, she’s right. I’m a Southern woman married to a half-Korean, half-Italian/Slovenian Yankee man twelve years my junior; I have two beautiful twenty-something daughters, an arthritic dappled dachshund and a morbidly obese cat. And now, after much thought and consideration — and then funding and injections, vaginal suppositories, and appointments — I have started motherhood all over again. This will be the story of us: our real modern family. Or maybe, more appropriately, our postmodern family. Postmodern, as in “radical reappraisal.” And our story is, indeed, a radical reappraisal of how to make and nurture a family.
Many things have changed since that summer almost three years ago when we began our in-vitro journey… I will do my best to record current happenings, as well as flashbacks to those glory days of post-modern fertilization, pregnancy pillows, and preeclampsia. I’m hoping our story will be an inspiration to those battling the frustrations of infertility, to those navigating the beautiful and rugged territory of twindom, and to those who decide to either start a family or do it all over again at a rather ripe age.
Even as I try to type this, I question why I’m doing it. I have nothing special to say. I’m nothing special. I nearly stop before I’ve begun, but then I think… I’m nothing special, true… but I do have something different to offer. I can’t imagine there are too many forty-nine year olds out there lactating. Not too many women out there with twenty-three years difference between their last baby girl and their most recent baby boys, not too many women who, as my father says, “ran the engine and the caboose when it comes to supplying grandchildren.” Not too many women out there who just suffered through a sixteen-month stint of extreme sleep deprivation. If nothing else, I can be a freak show for people to point at and ridicule. Still, I hope I can inspire a few to give postmodern family planning a go.
Since our big meal is Saturday for us this year, and since our tradition of putting up the tree the day-after-Thanksgiving is out the window thanks to the blessing of 3rd round of playoffs, I’ve done something I swore I’d never do. I’ve decorated BEFORE Thanksgiving.
And y’all, it may be blasphemy, but I’m a big convert. Huge. Obsessed.
And I keep looking at insta for new inspo. It’s a dangerous habit.
I’m officially hooked on retro Christmas. I initially couldn’t decide if I wanted midcentury, maximalist, or Christmas Carol quaint. If I should dry orange slices, add old-fashioned tinsel to the tree, sling in some beads, add ribbons and bows..
So I decided to just do it all.
Over the course of the last three days, our house has become a veritable cornucopia of Christmas.
In the kitchen nook, the Canes tree celebrates the season, plus there’s a new, white beauty with my grandmother’s Shiny Brites (salvaged from her basement straight out of the 1950s), and a few beloved ornaments gifted me by my girls.
In the library, there’s the boys’ tree, featuring both homemade and Bug and Bear themed ornaments, all tied together with paper garland.
In the living room, stands the largest and proudest tree of all, with an eclectic mix of blown glass, and this year, vintage bulbs in all their technicolor glory. And yes, I got tinsel!!!! — I love how it shimmies with the least little draft.)
And in the dining room, no tree, but Thanksgiving Boxes stacked to heaven and waiting on my precious loves, and a mixed metal centerpiece with matching chandelier.
Close by, on the mantel, my dearest Aunt Ann’s hand-sculpted A Christmas Carol dolls that she made for me my first year of teaching, and which my beloved Aunt Jan outfitted to perfection.
The porch got a tree too, of course, along with our snowman blow mold.
And the oranges? Well, I’m still figuring out where those will go, but they’re dried, folks, they’re dried.
In the meantime, dawn has draped ribbons of sun and cloud through my backyard pines. She, too, has decorated early.
Soon, laughter and conversation will percolate – a masterpiece of memories in the making – but for now, there is only my coffee and twinkling lights while my favorite ghosts of Thanksgivings past occupy my mind while I bask in the abundance of this Thanksgiving present and praise Him for whom all blessings in the future will surely flow.
Happy Thanksgiving and God bless us, every one.
I first fell in love with Thanksgiving when I went to live with my grandmother in East Tennessee. Until then, it had always been my immediate family gathered at the table for prayer and thanksgiving. A quiet, fellowship thing.
But then, in Tennessee, I found aunts and cousins, uncles and my grandmother, all around a bustling Formica table with aluminum chairs and red vinyl seats. It was all so busy and breathless, in the best possible way.
There were spinning chairs and laughter and games and pump organs and so many pies. And there were people here and there, and here and there, and here and there and everywhere. My heart and belly were overflowing with joy.
That’s where my love for Thanksgiving began.
And here’s where it flourishes now. In my own home as I prep for the arrival of all the chaos and children — now aunts and uncles, many with children of their own, and I, the mother, the grandmother, the matriarch.
I love a full house, full of blessings and thanksgiving.
Though one of my loves is in Miami and can’t be here this week. She’s tending to others as a brilliant badass surgeon and this year is her year to be there on call. And though I’m happy she’s there for her patients, I’m sad she can’t be here with us.
Still, she’s here in my heart, like all the rest who will be here and there and here and there and here and there and everywhere.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Sometimes you want sweet and settled. You want cozy cottages and wood smoke drifting lazily out of chimneys. Fog in the hedgerows and field mice scampering through the meadow.
But you don’t live in a fairytale and you don’t like (no really don’t like) mice. So, you shift your vision a bit. To here, where we are. After all, we need softness here now more than ever.
Your sweet and settled spot can be anywhere you are. Mine is a brick ranch home settled in a wooded lot. There’s a fire in the fireplace and a fog drifting through the half-acre wood. Squirrels scamper through lichened pines.
There’s comfort to be found here. And shelter from life’s storms. There’s a wreath on the door, lights on the porch, and cars soon parked in the half-circle drive.
Here, mornings are damp in November – the air newly cool, the earth still warm and exhaling mist. Groundhogs brewing coffee, so they say.
Now, fill each room with your favorite things: blankets and pillows, trinkets and treasures, plush, scattered rugs, pile after pile of well-loved books. (But only if that’s your thing. It’s most definitely mine.)
But most important of all, bring in your favorite people: family and friends, loved ones, neighbors. Pile on the comfort. Slather the joy. Love them, most tender and true. You wish you could do the same for the rest in this worrisome world. (I get it. Me, too.)
Because outside, leaves tumble and turn. Outside, spiders build nests for the winter. Outside the light gets dimmer and the air gets cold.
But inside there’s cozy. There’s comfort. There’s joy.
It’s not inside the house, though. (I mean it is. You’ve taken such trouble to pile on the posh pillows, after all.)
But the true cozy cottage you’ve built is your heart. Peep those lights in the window, there? The fire in the hearth? That’s all inside you. Along with sweets baking, gratitude singing, memories building.
Inside you, live the ones you love most in this world. So nurture them – and your own sweet, tender self too – so very well in these trying times.
Let thanksgiving stretch, slide soft into her warm, fuzzy slippers, and put the kettle on to boil. For in you, abides comfort and cozy. And joy.
They tiptoe around back,
velvet flanks broad,
flashes of cream tails,
not raised in alarm,
but wagging in whispers,
graceful necks dipping for moss
or lifting for leaves.
I nearly missed them,
these soft, silent, beauties.
Don’t you, too.
Keep an eye out for the
nearly silent beauty,
still nibbling away
at the underside of shade.
It’ll be what keeps us going,
keeps us lifted and searching,
ears twitching, feet pattering
toward goodness and mercy.
Find and follow the tender path.
There’s still softness to be found.
Postmodern names
of prepubescent children
felled by a postmodern problem
of colossal proportions
we refuse to accept.
so, we mourn them in post-shooting
posts with thoughts and prayers
and posthumous praise,
in postmodern funeral repasses
on Facebook, where families and friends
and communities and country
can come together
to wax poetic on
somebody’s children,
somebody’s teachers,
some bodies,
always bodies,
more bodies,
more babies,
posted about
postmortem,
but not fought for
while alive
Heather Peters Candela
The Preamble to my Constitution
But you can’t ward off what you were born to. May, August, September. Blossom, heat, and fruited trees, despite our father and his fundamental faith and expectations. We took to our seasons like Eve to the apple, even our hair played its role: honey crisp, wine sap, and golden delicious. Sprinkled tufts of owl feathers from the minute we flew from our mother’s warm nest into this cold world, eager to start a fire. Maybe we were what initiated his intrigue with chaos theory. He searched for balance and order forever after.
I’m the firstborn. Heather Leigh, a name my mother came up with after watching Brigadoon. Officially, a flowering shrub that grows wild on the rough Scottish heath, so maybe that’s why I’ve always bucked subjugation. In the summer, my hair and skin turned the hue of the hickory switches I got whipped with, thanks to what Dad called my dark countenance. Surly, he’d call me, but I disagree. While I do tend to slip toward solitude and silence, I’m a far cry from surly – I just don’t want to be controlled. I have waged an eternal war against being reined in. Rest assured, I’ll always fight against a bit. Take, for instance, back when I was labeled a Jezebel. When I snuck out. Shut down. Found myself shipped away before the hounds of the hell we were living with could devour me. I have to thank my father for that. And thank God, before he died, we’d mended our frayed connection. Though he never gave up preaching to me.
My second little sister is named Leslie Joyce. Her hair’s now the color of caramel cake, but back then, it was the curled black of burnt candlewicks – closest to his color. And if Dad was partial to any of us girls, it was Leslie. She’s still the closest one of us to taking up his holy mantel. The only one who still attends church. Her husband, her second – she and I are both on our second marriage – even teaches Sunday School to senior citizens. Daddy definitely approved. And honestly, I approve too. I’m happy for her. Happy she wasn’t scarred so severely that a house of worship raises her hackles and sends her scurrying away from the ghosts that still float in my mind, eager to froth up some mayhem.
It’s sad, really, how traumatized I am by the faith of my father. How the kindest, the most pure-intentioned texts about bible studies and organized prayers before football games can send me into a tailspin. I hesitate to compare it to a rape victim flinching at a tender, well-meaning touch… how a hug could trigger flashbacks of being encircled, overpowered, trapped, and out of control. How something so innocent can thrust a survivor back into the nightmare of her violent past….
But that’s the scenario that feels closest to how triggered I can become. John Donne prophesied my past before it was ever present when he wrote his Holy Sonnet and the lines, Batter my Heart, Three-Person’d God. That was the existence I led in my formative years. Back when my father and those elders did their best to o’ertrhow me and bend [their] force to break, blow, burn, and make me new — when I was already so brand-spanking-new and oh-so-incredibly vulnerable. And they did it. They battered and burned me, and while they didn’t break me, it stuck. It was imprinted, all the violence and force and fear. All that fury. So, maybe they really did break me after all.
And while I know that how I interpret Donne’s lines is not what he meant at all — and while I know how the Fellowship treated me and others was not what God’s words mean, not what God means, what Jesus means, what scripture means — that’s still what was done to me. And it’s still the baggage they left behind with me.
Likewise, I know it’s not what my friends, my fellow football wives, my fellow football parents mean, but violence in the name of God was what was done to me, and so when any sort of organized faith comes too close to me, it sends me crashing back into that place. Still. So, please know that about me, dear friends. And know that I mean no disrespect. No ill-intent. No judgement. It’s just trauma.
Lucky for Leslie, it does not do that to her. And I’m happy for her.
My other sister, she doesn’t attend church either. Her name is Emily Jo – or JoJo, as we call her. She was younger when I was shipped off. I was sixteen, making her twelve, so a lot of what was happening went over her head. She just woke up one morning and I was gone. That’s probably why she does her best to be the life of the party, the center of attention – so she won’t wake up dispatched and forgotten one morning. So, while she woke up with one less sister one Saturday, Leslie rode with Dad and me over the Mississippi River and through the Appalachian woods– to Grandmother’s house we’d gone. They left the next day in my Dad’s blue Isuzu Gemini, Leslie traumatized about leaving me, but not about what sent me there. The wrath of God and Daddy never came down on her head. She’d seen first-hand what it could do. Therefore, she remained obedient and does ‘til this day, staying in Our Father’s sights every single Sunday.
But honestly, banishment with a flaming sword brought me to where I am today. Honestly, it’s a pretty good place out here east of Eden. I have a beautiful life, with four beautiful children, and the man I was meant to find. The man who complements, not completes me. Have there been hiccups and hang ups along the way? Absolutely. But I have learned that I am enough. I have always been enough. I am ample and, as Whitman declared, I contain multitudes. And what’s more, I am able to be multitudes and I am able to speak my multitudes. Fully. To be me and to speak my mind. Until you’ve been denied those things, you never know how verily important they are. Yes, I said verily. Because this, which I speak to you, is my truth. And the truth will set you free.
wrapped in rough fabric in slanted light,
hollow, wire frame pressed tight,
beaded spine resting in the space between,
like a bowl-backed mandolin that no longer plays
the music gone still.
soon silent.
only this is no instrument.
he’s a child.
an empty-bellied, innocent child.
a dying child.
his mother there too, eyes closed...
in prayer?
in defeat?
in suspension of disbelief?
the unreal reality of us closing our eyes
to him,
his frail body,
his fledgling hair,
the delicate loops and whorls of his crown --
a fingerprint of our hands-on, hands-off approach to people
in this war
between
the right ways and wrong ways to occupy land
between
the right ways and wrong ways to worship god
between
the right ones and wrong ones to care about
to support
to feed
to lend aid
to weaponize
to fire bomb
to shoot in the street as they try not
to starve
this is a picture of a mother holding her child
not an instrument
of war
please may the war stop.
not the music of this little boy's heart.
I fish the inky depths,
trawling dark waters for the hard words
to tell the hard stories
tossed like trash by the devil and his damned
overboard, where they want them to sink.
Where he sends truth to die,
sends victims to lie
beneath oil-slickened, oil-sickened waters
where false rainbows plume, false promises bloom
at the greedy hands of powerful men.
So many left capsized to sink in the ruin of his reign.
But I’ll start with The Kids.
All the children of the lesser gods.
All The Kids not made in his image.
The Kids wrapped in girl bodies,
sealed transcripts and semen-stained trails
and tales so no one will see nor will hear.
The Kids wrapped in historical faiths, covered in
shrapnel and terra cotta skin and bones and pleas
our nation refuses to see nor to hear.
The Kids trapped in red tape and undocumented
tugs of war between parents who love them and
a government that relegates with reptilian hate.
The Kids tagged with special needs, basic needs,
clawed back with initiatives meant to
educate and feed the least of these.
The Kids of all needs, colors, creeds
returning to schools with clear backpacks, but no clear
game plans nor gun laws to thrive and stay alive.
Kids. So many Kids.
Discarded. Discounted. Dissociated. Detached.
From our eyes and ears and hearts and minds.
Without a thought.
Without a prayer.
Kids.
I sift through the last-recent pictures of him,
listen to his one remaining voice mail.
Hello, it’s your Dad. I’m doing just great.
No problems whatsoever.
I like hearing that. I suppose now, it’s true.
I’m sure he keeps counsel with his favorite
cold war space race physicists at some marble-
topped table in heaven, the holy trinity in attendance.
His parents and sister there too.
A month before we lost him, he was worried about losing her.
When the time comes, will you drive me to her funeral?
Absolutely I would have, but he didn’t make it.
And she couldn’t make it to his.
This Father’s Day week, I thrilled at the Strawberry Moon
with Mercury, Jupiter, Mars all in tow. Even Venus joined
the party. The night sky is the love language I learned from
my dad. I remember standing barefoot in crabgrass, scarcely
knee-high to a June Bug, constellations wheeling above us,
as he pointed out stars, taught me the planets, conditioned
me to swoon over lunar events.
The moon vanished the weekend we buried him,
slipped away into Earth’s shadow as I facetimed
his twin sisters, one wrapped in the bedsheets she’d
never again leave.
They watch me now as I write, he and my aunt --
a pair of cardinals (if legends hold true) appearing each dawn –
wings a brilliant Mars red, eyes mercurial dark.
I do my best to reassure him.
Hello, it’s your daughter. I’m doing just great.
No problems whatsoever.
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