Paul raises the question
(He says
You asked of me)
What does she think of me?
And while
I would prefer
To tell you
Face to lovely
Face
I will give you two concurrent answers
Simple one first-
My beautiful
Daughter my
Beautiful daughter
My beautiful daughter
Beautiful.
Daughter.
My…
Infinitely beautiful girl
pretend you had a lost daughter
Who in your mind will always be
A beautiful baby girl
Now pretend that in order to survive
You start to see your beautiful lost baby
In everyone
Then “everyone” starts to do things they really should not do
Go places they should not go
Smash through rules…
designed for their safety
So you, poor sot, try to warn them away…
From the crap they should not get into
But they don’t really wanna listen
Because who the heck are you anyway?
(Half-crazed stranger with some lost kid)
Yet you still
love them
You know because you lost a child.
So you go find them
In the crack houses
Strip joints
And IRS offices where they work
…and screw up royally
Because you know
That is what love does
Abstract-I get it
So let me try once more–
Years ago I rode on a bus in a country men travelled to in order to have “legal” sex with minors.
A white man got on the bus with a girl from this other country.
A girl, not a woman.
We. The people on the bus. Watched them travel together. Knowing (ball-parking, at least)…their destination.
Their terrible destination.
If she is alive somewhere I would hold her
Tell her her “job” was not her fault
Tell her I love you
(No matter what)
–I love you
Now please darling,
Come home.
you were always
Mythical.
A place I longed to be
A harbor in the storm
Heck–flowers and chocolate!
Go no distance to describe
The way these stem cells of each
Her babies carry her
As she and they
Grow up
Her eldest may lodge
In her vision
Her youngest in her chest
And each in between
Find places in her blood and bone to
Insinuate their eternal
DNA into hers
You might call them sneaky
But she will call them all
Dear–
Dear to stay
When each day she fears
This child will be too soon
“A grown-assed man, Mom!”
(Sic)
And she will compress and fold
Each memory of her babies
In the laugh lines
Around her eyes.
Donning her eye patch
From the foyer
Of this quiet
suburban domicile
mother spies the place
Where she will hoist
The skull-and-crossed bones
Talisman
of her new-found pirate
Heart. She shimmies the gutter pipe
Hangs the flag from the gabled roof
Bids the children–
Swab the deck! Hoist the sail! Board the stern!
Bemused, they do their level best
This ship once an ordinary…
Home?
Until Papa returns
Salutes his lawless mate (sailcloth on her makeshift mast
suspiciously similar to
laundry on the line)
The Jolly Roger, eh? He asks
Surprising unfazed.
Come down, my Pirate Queen
And tell all
Your loyal crew
What hast tha’ plundered for our dinner?
girl you got
Wings down your spine
Silvery feathers
An anthem in your head
Sing it, Girl–
Sing loud
Whole world to hear
Percuss.
heart a bird caged in bones
Use it all to
Question every undisputed
Law mitigating the force
Of gravity and light
With your full-throated
Iridescent flight
Rise up
Rise.
Easter morning.
The sun rises on a rolling hill in New Braunfels as worshippers gather to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus.
Yet as the dawn Christians worship, a savage domestic drama unfolds within yards of the sanctuary.
Felix Antonio Nieves, seventeen years old, dies as the result of what news sources have described as a protracted domestic argument.
The accounts of the last moments of Nieves’ life describe multiple weapons–stun guns, a pistol, and the shotgun used to end his life.
What is shocking about this story?
7:15 on Easter morning?
The quiet neighborhood?
The proximity to a church?
Or the knowledge neighbors have that their neighbors include law enforcement officers? That this is a neighborhood where people might feel safer because some of their own neighbors are officers of the peace?
Or again, that this neighborhood is within a mile or two of a police station?
Maybe. But what shocks me is that in a protracted story of domestic violence, no one called for police intervention until a murder had already been committed.
What does that say about Texas? About us? About justice?
We should call the police before we load and shoot a gun.
Why didn’t they? Why did no one call the police until it was too late to save one family from irrevocable tragedy?
The answers might surprise us all…if we were brave enough to face them.
The sky was very blue in Beaver, PA on November 13th, 1998. There was a cop car parked down the block. I looked at it and wondered–did they put it there for me?
Had I planned a run to Canada I would have take off already.
People from our church came. Reporters came. They gathered around us in our pain.
Then the caseworker came.
I will never forget what happened between the house and my last glimpse of you in that car, but even after 16 years I don’t want to write it down.
Still too painful.
All of it, too painful.
Maybe splendor
Is a girl
Rowing her younger brother to the
Far shore
She tells him she he will be
A cowboy there
He asks her how he can be
Without a hat
She tells him
you will make one
From the twigs and branches
And leaves there
And you will have a cow you will name Horse and another named Ted or Fred, he said
Yes.
She says, and a chicken…now get your clothes and race me up the hill.
A chicken named
Get-your-clothes-and-race-me-up-the-hill,
I am haunted by an image on a nature program–a young zebra stallion savages a newborn foal to death because the foal was fathered by a predecessor.
We turned the television off, but not before the narrator states that the foal’s “ordeal is over” and will not survive the attack.
I understand the rules of natural videography: don’t obstruct the narrative. I just believe it is time we change the rules for animals and men.
I have little doubt that the film crew could have saved the foal and found a place for it in sanctuary. They simple did not.
We simply do not as well. We avoid conflict with humans even when it is their own children they savage to death.
Abortion is an extreme form of child abuse. Yet we treat it with temerity, speaking gently of “a woman’s right to choose.”
Some choices are unacceptable: cruel, inhumane, deadly.
It would have been humane and appropriate for the men who watched the foal die to intervene on its behalf. They did not because they wanted the narrative, because the paradigm has not been sufficiently challenged.
Time to challenge it.
If we stand by and watch children, anyone be savaged, victimized, or harmed by another and do not intervene, we are culpable.
If we stay quiet in the face of injustice, then we must own this narrative. The crime belongs to all of us unless we are willing to speak up, intervene, challenge the paradigm for our dead and missing children.
Wendy Davis is soon to release a memoir with her description of the late-term termination of her daughter diagnosed with what sounds like agenesis of the corpus callosum.
Unfortunately while her description of her daughter’s actual physical condition is recognizable, her prognosis for the little girl is not.
Lots of people live long and meaningful lives with this condition. They may need help from developmental therapies, their lives may be altered by their condition, but they are definitely not
“blind, deaf, and in a total vegetative state”
In fact, quite the contrary–Kim Peek, the inspiration for the movie Rain Man was born with ACC.
Neuropsychological tests of people born with ACC sometimes indicate that some people may “think a little differently,” but sustain normal lives and present with average intellectual functions.
Interestingly enough there are many other syndromes associated with ACC, some genetic and some not. Two of the not-genetic are maternal nutritional deficiencies and fetal alcohol syndrome.
Regardless of cause, any child or fetus diagnosed with ACC deserves the full protection of the law and the ADA, not medical termination because of their prognosis.
Wendy made a choice, but it was not a choice that supported the rights of her unborn daughter or any other child diagnosed with a learning difference or special need.
I want to live in a state, in a country, governed by the staunch belief that Americans with disabilities deserve full protection under the law regardless of their age, level of ability, or any other distinguishing factor.
To terminate the life a disabled person just because she is or may be disabled is a tragedy indeed.
Carrying Light 