Only one of them, the beloved, would be clueless and self-absorbed, inclined to foibles and easily distracted
A regular
Flibbertigibbet!
But the Other One—
He would always be true.
Always true
Reply
February 27th, 2020 in Italy
I do simple math–100 divided by 360 million equals .00000028 times 60 million equals 17.
February 27th was the day that Italy stood where we are now. 0.000000028 Italian had died of Covid-19 and now 0.00000028 Americans have
Died of Covid-19
In 20 days they have lost so many people
More than 2500 (0.0042)
Three weeks
I am always haunted by three weeks
In the future (15,120)
And all the pleasant pictures
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.
Tragedy plus time equals…
Our last pandemic
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
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
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.
Staring at the Door
I draw lines transecting the doorway
Vertical then horizontal
Drab, heavy old thing
I cannot open it, cannot move it toward me, as in this scenario I would have no opposable
Thumbs, thumbs dug into the wet clay of our terrible
Mortality
While You
Let me through every time
To this endless deep
Expanse of night, the wind, the grieving girl who would
Tell you never leave
One Goodbye, One Goodnight
Oh, darling, spring
Takes ahold a little
More each day
In the leaves over us, in the moon through the branches of this
Place you have been
All these years I
Will miss you
When mountains crumble
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.
Carrying Light 