Our last pandemic

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Elea Lee

A couple years ago my family went through a pandemic. It was a bad year for kitten parvo or panleukopenia, and we were kitten fosters.

We lost them all and watched the feral kittens at a local park disappear one by one.

It was devastating. Some shelters were euthanizing kittens on arrival. It changed everyone who was involved.

And I stopped fostering kittens. My kids couldn’t take it anymore.

Everything felt normal on the outside that summer. Humans all around us lived totally unaware of the chaos and brutal death we experienced.

I think about that summer every day. The numbers on this pandemic are not as catastrophic as the panleukopenia, but each death represents a wound to family, friends, and community.

I believe in hand sanitizer and sterile fields, but I believe in our eternal nature more.

We need to pray, to sing loud to God. We need to make our lives count for something eternal

Every day we have

Together

Coronavirus

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Elea Lee

All over the world

Right now

People just like

You and me

Have begun to

Live in fear

Of our own

Invisible, creeping

Spinning, spiny, tiny, inevitable invisible crowns

Empty shelves

Where once cellophaned signifiers of

All that can be wiped away–

Canned food, pasta, string cheese, milk

Fomite transmission

You and me

Gone

Don’t worry, Darling

He took all our thorny little crowns

Smoothed each out

Like a girl braiding her sister’s hair

Singing some sort of song about

A proper crown for the One True King

Come to save us all.

The Irony of Leana Wen

Posted on March 15, 2020 by Elea Lee

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.

When mountains crumble

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Elea Lee

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.

because they were harassed and helpless

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Elea Lee

Matthew 9:35-38 NIV
[35] Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. [36] When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. [37] Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. [38] Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Winged Victory

Posted on February 21, 2020 by Elea Lee

When I was very young we were in Paris and the street vendor said we should buy a small tinny replica of Winged Victory. My mother demurred, said we were going to see “the real thing.”

When we walked into the Louvre and she pointed to it—massive, majestic, breathtaking. I asked how much did that one cost?

She said priceless.

You are my real thing, far more priceless than Winged Victory

Little Bird

Posted on February 20, 2020 by Elea Lee

I wake with your feather weight along my sternum, papoosed across

My spine

I mourn my inability to save

You from this uncertain and inevitable

Loss

Take you with me everywhere

Haunt me, girl-child

Make me do

impossible things

for love

The Feast of Thorns

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Elea Lee

Long before our terrible story your birthday was already

the feast of Servites pruning winter roses. I cling to that now, all the other days this day could be:

Obstinate mountains lumber into obeisant seas

Lame men whole, blind men see

Dead men rise and shake off their shroudy bindings

impossible things all around ya

If only you will

See

The Invisible World

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Elea Lee

Not often enough

Do I think about the light I cannot see

The whole beings made of it who

Could be standing right beside me

defined by light not visible to me

Or smell, or touch or sound or taste

All senses which could be

Stronger somehow–

A male polar bear can smell a mate from 100 hundred miles away

Sharks can smell single droplets of

Blood in the water miles away

What portion of my human brain is cordoned off for

My sense of Love? How far, how long, how wide a net

Will you cast for me?

Writer’s Block

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Elea Lee

I learned a long time ago that even a child can have dark spots, scorched places where

Love should have been

She writes to probe an old wound we share between us

A ghost who walks and spits and curses his proper Maker

What can I say?

What can I tell you that has not already transpired between us?

Only that God can tell a girl to go look

For her little sister (to play)

Then set the captives free

Carrying Light

Words for light

Category Archives: child advocacy