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About Elea Lee

Foster parent, adopting parent, family advocate, educator, homeschool parent

When I was younger

I used to write either to process grief, hold onto God, or take pictures with words.

I wrote poetry to hide and survive
Hide the full story
Survive the storm
Or whatever…
When you are 22 you want to be famous and loved

Now I understand better why I write one way or another
Prose is the plodding slow reward of a clean house
Poetry is a fencing match
A race against prose
Say something
Before it is too late

Try writing ordinary things
As poems
A fight with someone you love?
A grocery list
Acknowledges the power
Of the smallest things
We can
Take for granted

Give me a new country

Uncock the gun

Release the bullets

Into the palm of your hand

Put the weapon down

Smash it into pieces

Sown into earth

Like the teeth of the mythical

Dragon

Pull down the walls

Release the lions

They will feed now

On grass like the Lamb

Who has tamed them

Undo all  the damage

Unleashed by thIs savage

Heart  next to

A river, next to a Tree

At the center of this new country

A free speech issue

A woman on a plane objects to forced proximity to pornography and is told she has no support.  She must endure another person’s objectional material.  Which is, btw, degrading and offensive to women.

No one comes to her aid, and the NYTimes walks on egg shells when they report it.

A respectable American businessman who practices fair, nondiscriminatory hiring and follows his conscience in his business is vilified because he has the temerity to exercise his first amendment right to say he supports a traditional view of marriage.

Guy has a right to talk

But…

The truth is that one of the major reasons the marriage argument is huge and important is that millions of Americans live in fear because of hate.  Hate kills, maims, tortures, intimidates, and dehumanizes people.  Just because of their sexual identity.

No person in this country should have to hide who they are because they are afraid of violence.

No person should be the target of violence because they are gay or transgendered.

We have to start with that.

We have to build from the ground up.

Love requires it.

I broke my own rule

One time in the same week I wrote a letter to someone and a poem to someone else.  Both someones had behaved badly.  My intrepid partner (always the English major) told me he liked the poem more than the letter.

Of course, I thought. Poetry is the marble colonade you hide in when followed by ghosts or splendor.  A letter is an everyday thing.  Too blunt to be art.  But is any of this about Art?

No.  Not really.  It is about sanctuary and splendor.  Borrowed safety and borrowed beauty.

And attempting however obliquely to suggest the existence of Absolute Love.

So I violated my own rule about my other blog– called etiology.  I told myself I would keep etiology free of my obsession with grief and injustice and the anger that follows these things.

I once wrote a poem I cannot see myself publishing.  Too painful, too personal.  I once wrote a letter to C’s prison therapist which simply described C’s crimes from what his victims and witnesses had said.  Just the facts, as they say.  The therapist read it and said he read my anger.

 

Anger? I thought.  That was just the facts.  I wonder what he would think if he saw my angry letter.