Tragedy plus time equals…
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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.
because they were harassed and helpless
Matthew 9:35-38 NIV
[35] Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. [36] When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. [37] Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. [38] Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Welcome Home, Antarctic Explorers!
I was there when you packed your bags, when you got the passport pictures, (the garrulous postal employee who took them was a highlight!). I was there for all the worry–the mama worry–and there for the day when we drove to the airport all together
To see you off to
Great Adventure!
Despite all my trepidations, I was excited for all of you. I thought this will be cool and said take lots of pictures!
I went in with my eyes wide open
Too many emails back and forth with grownups
getting paid a lot to take you there
Not Mothers Teresas at all
But I didn’t expect this
The lonely road home
The uphill battle just to get you back home
You are home now, darlings
And never let anyone tell you
You are worth anything less than the whole world entire
I would tell you
If I could stand in every airport in the world
Homemade Sign held high and goofily askew
Letters spelt out–
💜WELCOME HOME, ANTARCTIC EXPLORERS!!💙
You mean the world to me
Covid-19 Asymptote
For the last several days I have looked at the The Italian Health Ministry obsessively, tracking the numbers for Covid-19 in Italy.
One day the number was around 370, then very quickly it jumped to 400, 525, 650…each time the death toll went up too as well as the number of people deemed recovered.
So I keep track:
Carrying Light 