Most days I try
To plunge into the same body of
Cool water
Sun on the surface
Always blue beneath
Unplumbable like oceans
This place I go to see you
In the tumbled pieces of ill-formed autobiography
You, always you
you, always you
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Category Archives: child advocacy
One Million Daisies
She has been a cloud, a curved white wave, a story from a picture, the daughter who won’t answer back, reminder of all I have lost, world is full of daisies, I could find one now, on hands and feet in the night. They are common things, hands and feet in the dark, looking for lost flowers, people we always knew we needed. One million daisies, little flower faces, pushed to rough angles by this lion’s wind, breathing us into impossible life.
Deer Grace
I always show up somewhat grudgingly, worried about imaginary time, until I see how much he loves them and how much they need him while in the after dark crickets sing
Our Savage Selves
I don’t own a gun but I am grateful the barefoot neighbor in Sutherland Springs did.
Every time we face the devastation of a mass shooting in this country I want to say things like:
We cannot monetize an entertainment culture of violence and not expect it to sway the unhinged.
If we want “better” gun laws we have to enforce the ones we already have.
Andhow many of us know there will be a fatal gap between when 911 is dialed and when help arises?
Without civil accountability in public safety
There is no safety at all.
3 min drive
How to clean a toilet
When I tell you I found the old mushroom-colored sweatshirt which saw us through thick and thin you will know I am talking about the way the Romans used to have it done, long pole, wad of cloth, vinegar soaked as we raise it to the real hero, his naked pain, the way he eschews ordinary safety for a stretched-to-the-limits agony
I take the brush, add the cleanser, wipe it all down with an uneasy litany
Drab for color
Old for young
Plain for beautiful
Forgotten for remembered
He says
Me for you
Death for life
Life, everlasting.
Baby Jane Doe
I had not expected you to be
Consumed in a blast of politicized mambo-jumbo
Then just as suddenly
Reduced to silence
when the wolves got what they came for
You–downy layer of protective hair
Beating heart, the ability to grasp and suck and distinguish
Light and the way things taste
Orange-sized child
If I could have pressed my face close
To your mother’s belly
You could have picked out my voice
Telling you how much I wanted you
To live.
Me n’ Hillary down by the schoolyard
I have been pro-life, pro-woman, pro-child my whole life. So to be accosted by strangers and friends as somehow anti-woman and anti-feminist for not voting for Hillary Clinton for anything is astounding to me.
Why would I vote for militant anti-child women?
If I am a feminist it is my job to speak out about the brutal forced abortions reflected in worldwide abortion statistics as well as the now incontrovertibly evidence of anti-female fetal termination.
Which in lay-woman’s terms is killing baby girls.
No. Hillary Rodham Clinton was never the feminist choice. This is us, gone missing.
Abortion by the numbers
Any Boat in a Storm
It has been 30 years since I made the (not very complicated) decision not to vote for political candidates who support abortion.
Abortion on-demand–at-all-is and will be our generation’s genocide stain. The comparison to other genocidal impulses* is not that difficult to make–
- Genocide systematically dehumanizes the victims
- Genocide creates words and epithets to divide victims and devalue them from the rest of us
- Genocide targets people who are legally exposed, minorities, female, from disenfranchised classes (often created through the repeated use of dehumanizing terms), the medically fragile, people whose basic human rights have been suspended or exempted
- Genocide finds ways to stigmatize and blame the victims
- Genocide labels victims as “unwanted”
- Genocide institutionalizes, regularizes, industrializes, and monetizes mass murder
- And many times genocide co-ops scientists and medical professionals by couching the process of mass killing as medically necessary or scientifically interesting
- Genocide kills people.
Do you know the statistics for aborted people in your state, country or region? Do you know when it was legalized and who it targets?
You should.
We all should.
We will have to make an account for every one.
*for the purpose of cohesion I have not separated out gendercide, femicide, or the systemic killing of disabled people, all of which characterize abortion and have been components of genocide as well.
