I told myself I would
Swim the coldest days
Knowing the river runs
Warmer than the air making it
Rise in Holy Ghost waves
I turn to watch the tide
Tell me you remember
Every day you stayed with me
When all the cool kids
Left town
The little boy in the picture wore the most adorable overalls
And brand-spanking-new shoes
He approached the chicken in the unfamiliar garden
With the utmost deference,
The pears still hung on the trees, each carefully wrapped in old newspapers to shield them from pestilence
An unseasonably warm day to worship one’s ancestors and
The food at the restaurant was good
Something about historically accurate food
In the last few moments before
The two little red-headed children
Reported
All they saw–aggressor-accomplice-victim
The little boy in the picture wore the most adorable overalls
When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.
I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,
Sea like the color of his eyes
Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together
Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all
Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce
C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me
But I can still remember
The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist
The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because
Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang
The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car
If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly
It would not begin to be as much as you are worth
Of your eternal value
Of the Light you can become forever
If you just
Turn and face the Sea.
I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children
If only an ordinary person like me could
Cast a spell with words
Hocus pocus–live!
Abracadabra–live!
I alternate between believing
That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or
The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing
Calvariums.
The idea that a person whose sole job it is to cut out and exterminate living humans from their home by force is “a real doctor” is directly related to the Rabbits of Ravensbruck, the death camps of Hitler, the medical experiments conducted on unwilling victims by “licensed doctors” in WWII German and Poland, to Pol Pot, and ultimately to all the forced, anti-disability, and sex-attributed abortions around the world.
Real doctors try to save life, not crush unborn patients. So I get why the Supreme Court would be a little confused about the Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges.
But it is a good and appropriate law and should have been upheld.
If it is not, then we must ask what the five ruling justices think will happen when the mothers in these clinics face the physical trauma of an operation or procedure that is by its very definition violent?
They will face it alone, because the person who did this to them does not live in their community. Does not reveal their true identity. Does this thing to them and then leaves them alone.
When our courts are unjust and our moral compass has been knocked out by nearly 50 years of acquiescence to legal and institutional murder, it is no wonder that we have lost our way.
We will not find it again without facing what we have done and what it has cost us–
Our very souls and our own children.
Abortion is murder, not medicine, and SCOTUS has just proved it by shielding practitioners who perform it from the full and appropriate licensing and credentialing process.
Shame on us. Shame and mourning.
Job 4:7 NIV
[7] “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?
Abortion. That is where.
I have been a big fan of Alex Hirsch since first encountering Gravity Falls. The series is layered, well-written, lovable, and infinitely quotable. So last night when I found out that Hirsch and his partner have raised money for Planned Parenthood, it was point of sorrow.
Seems ironic that a man whose works are written for children would not see that abortion kills children.
I know, I sound quite plaintive and simplistic, but I can’t stop thinking about one of Hirsch’s most lovable creations–a clone of his comic placeholder, Dipper Pines.
I wonder how Hirsch could have kept the narrative alive for Dipper’s several (and equally lovable) clones?
Keeping the narrative alive–
The opposite of the deadly agenda of Planned Parenthood.
He is gone now
Gone to me, anyway
But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–
Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended
What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair
Forever/
Just
… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes
All your regrets all your missed chances
To cry like a baby
Wail for a Savior
Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent
Shaken finally by what you
Would have been without Him
It is 4:53 in the morning and the-multiverse-you is sleeping somewhere
(Perhaps held in the arms of her beloved)
…she does not know about the foster children, or the loss, the things you use to distract you
From the sound of being cracked open
a meal, a primitive marine creature–a crab, a lobster, a clam
The oral surgeon calls the missing piece of you by the kind of nickname you might use for a lovable but naughty child—that little stinker or cuss or rascal
Only, the-multiverse-you tells it as though it were a puzzling but mildly discomfiting dream
No mention, no hint even
Of global dishevelment and chaos on the planet where she sleeps,
untouched
As you fiddle with various words for comfort to mask the pain
In all the broken places.
I have now heard a cool 3 times from Leana Wen, alternately billed as emergency room physician or former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore on how we can do various (good and helpful) things to slow down the coronavirus spread.
So where is the irony?
Leana’s last and most notable job was not being either an ER doc or a health commissioner, it was being the public face of Planned Parenthood, an organization dedicated to promoting and providing abortions.
Abortion kills a lot more humans than Covid-19. We could quibble at the death rate for the latter–1 percent to 9 percent depending on the demographics and strains.
But the abortion kill rate is pretty damn close to 100 percent. If an unborn baby gets exposed to abortion
He or she usually doesn’t live long enough to quibble
About omissions in Leana Wen’s cv.
Think about it.
Your darkest night
Your loneliest moment
The here-and-there times when it is either your own
Life or the life of the beloved
Taken from you
Faith I get
Love anchors
But it is my squint-into-the-sun-reticence about hope
Which drives me to speak
Of mountains.
Today darling the mountains
Are all shaped like crowns
Crowns of thorns or flowers,
The braided laurels of an imperial victory
He said, it is finished beneath these crumbling mountains
And I will wait, sometimes in tears
To see them all
Thrown into the sea.
