While my son brushes his teeth I take the number of people who have died by now from Covid-19 in the United States and divide it by our total population
Then I find what Day Italy had the same ratoo
Then I take the number of people who died in Italy today
And divide it by the total population
Then multiple that decimal by our total population
By this rough equation
Three weeks from now our fatalities will bave
Risen to 18,000
I could not tell you a name for
the pallet of this one night sky
Inkyblueblack
One plane
Less than the usual number in the airspace threaded between San Antonio and Austin
And a single small snake down below
Licking its way across rough cement
Most likely non-venomous, but
Who can tell
When things are still so
new?
I have been having the mildest of stress dreams–quirky, bureaucratic hotel check ins, attempts to gather the hard-to-shepherd, things washed away. I know why the dreams have come, and I doubt they will leave me soon, even if the heat and intensity of a gathering sun should cause them to lose their inevitable grip and dissipate
I turn to morning songs and croak out broken praises
Think I should listen to the Gospel, but chose Isaiah instead
Because these are old
And New Testament times
And we are all in wont
of fierce faces
Isaiah 2:16 KJV
[16] And upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures.
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.
I pull down the old book, look for recipes for cultivating children, like the time she sewed the earth with dragon’s teeth and made them into men…
I don’t want men
I want daisies
Dozens and dozens, hundreds and hundreds, legions and legions, fields upon fields
Filled with Bellis perennis–beauties everlasting
Because only God can
Make lasting
Children out of words
And wildflowers
The moon ploughs up, silver boat on the sea of night. You see it all clear now, I suppose, about the way we become and belong to what or who we
Worship
If not love, then war
Which will
Tear a man to pieces.
Psalm 20:7 NIV
[7] Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
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.
The girl with the long, dark hair bows her head in prayer as the ghostman’s call to arms wafts across our breaking
Passover bread, the belief that all promises are binding
Will keep us, will keep us
Bound to the hands of beauty
Could be a lost child or the appearance of a tear in ordinary fabric. Could be the silence of the resurrected or the name of a wildflower on the back of a bus, here today and gone tomorrow no recorded words, no age, no cause of death, just a suddenly re-spooling life
As though you could call what we do here spooling,
as though any word at all could substitute for resurrection.
In five years a boy goes from child to young man, unless a day changes everything
For everyone
For all of us
The street, the people who remain there
Never the same
No amount of water
Can wash away grief
Carrying Light 