For months now I have walked carefully, gingerly, with the rocking gait of the elderly, infirmed, or, in my case, feet surreptitiously lamenting for the loss of the whole–
broken heart
crepe-fine skin
Liver, spleen, lungs, and stomach all exposed
As the obligate carnivores we tended as children stalk the house now
Grown
Larger than life,
Pacing hungrily to and fro
As we eye them in dismay
Their pets now
An image has been taken, carefully constructed–a smiling woman with her small child, a pink placard, and a message of support for the categorical destruction of babies remarkably similar to her own.
When I was younger the rhetoric surrounding the clinical extermination of humans before the age of birth was careful, reluctant, almost sheepish or apologetic. Famous among these voices was Hillary Clinton who said that the aim of promoting legal abortion was to make it, “…rare”
When I was younger “the unborn” were called babies by those on both sides of the argument.
When I was unborn, abortion was illegal.
Not now.
Now there is a veritable cacophony of irate institutions and voices–democratic presidential hopefuls, movie streaming services, (ironically) the Disney company, a long list of celebrities, and that smiling lady with her baby on the grass
All bent upon promoting and facilitating medical murder.
And with each carefully posed picture, each premeditated exclamation of outrage they push down the simple facts–we have laws in this country which promote and facilitate the brutal, violent, dehumanizing murder of millions of people.
People who would one day watch Disney movies
People who might subscribe to Netflix
People who would argue unequivocally for their own right to life
If they were allowed to live long enough to
Sing
where have all the flowers gone?
Our children all
Gone.
Pfft. I started to write a short story about you and your fairy godmother. She is a larger-than-life-take-no-guff fictional lady who lives in a real house in a real town where we both had our hearts broken.
She had a red-brick house with an actual turret in the middle of the cozy little town Kipling called Muskrat–Kipling, who might have advised handing you over to Baloo or Bagheera had you and I met up with him in our peripatetic trips about town.
I would let you run (fast as you can) to each stop sign (but wait for me there), most alarming for the people in their cars, always concerned you would just keep running.
I realized I could not finish the story. You can’t know a fairy godmother is trustworthy on the first or the second or the 500th day. You can’t know until
You figure out for yourself why and how she stares down all comers
As the most beautiful music
Spills out over the lawn, into the dark, dark night.
The sun inhales deep, swims down, down to us through a drowned world of trees, still our guardian angels, bright fish dart among them, impersonating song birds, the children are not safe here anymore
As ordinary men huddle and cast lots
for the seamless robe of
God
Survivors get to decide what they do with their story.
My daughter reminds me of this when I complain about a particular rape narrator who seems to be exonerating people who actively refused to value her need to be heard over points in a game.
What I would tell if she answered my email is:
…but they are, and as long as they are, your message is not enough, whether it is what you say or don’t say to a group of athletes, or what you tell the mother of a rape victim
By not answering her at all.
He has found a little stream, dips his feet into the water away from all the others. When I ask him about all he has lost, he shrugs as if to say
Lost wife
Lost country
Lost king
Lost friends
But he has new friends now, even among the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren of his erstwhile wife.
He recites these my-life-for-yours words as if the man who wrote them had written them for him…
….He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. [18] The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the mighty. [19] A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle. [20] A man’s belly shall be satisfied with the fruit of his mouth; and with the increase of his lips shall he be filled. [21] Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. [22] Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing , and obtaineth favour of the Lord . [23] The poor useth intreaties; but the rich answereth roughly. 24] A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly:
…there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.
Let us wait here, darling
Until he comes.
Was it a crime for the man in the silver truck to exit his vehicle to drag the wounded doe to the median?
Then leave her there.
Was it a crime to drive past her
her immobility
As she lifted her head
in pain and wonder
At all of us, terrible Samaritans
Leaving her to die alone.
Strange how we can take words and reduce them to
shadows of their former selves
Willfully diminishing
What casts a shadow
and the utter strength of light
Inside the camera frame men laugh about bartering girls as sex slaves.
Where are these men now?
Where are their victims?
Is there a Mendelian trait for “monster?”
It is easy to focus on the unfamiliarity of words
They use
For the blue or green eyes
of their victim
But locker rooms are locker rooms
everywhere because
the god of lust and violence has so many
F*cking clothes in his f*cking closet
I have known for some time that using the clipped, incisive, deliberate forms associated with poetry was one way to write about the devastation caused by my adopted son.
I started writing the poetry publicly when the prose seemed too difficult for people.
You could call this the “it’s too awful” syndrome, or you could call it the complicity principle. People either do not want to face the devastation and intimacy of sexual assault or they have their own story and do not really want to scrutinize how their story was handled. Notice the passive tense–change the passive tense–how they handled their story.
We have debilitating and unwarranted stigmata which we apply to the victims of sexual assault in a highly prejudicial and unscientific fashion.
All cases of sexual assault are woefully underreported, yet we claim to understand rape victims.
You cannot have a principled, scientific understanding of a condition if you force the sufferers of the condition into silence.
Nor can you ever separate the “symptoms” of victimhood out from the original crime or the subsequent, devastating consequences of enforced silence.
Every victim of a crime deserves relief, but in rape, the victim often faces subsequent harm.
They are told to be quiet or they will be marginalized.
That marginalization never stops. It can happen any time a victim shares their story.
I know because I just watched it happen again, and again, and again when my daughter wrote her college entrance essay on her rape story.
Carrying Light 