Around 9:19 Sunday morning, a group of the gleaming victorious held their trophy improbably aloft as they processed along a predetermined route–grass, soil, concrete, rock. An entire congregation of them, as exoskeletal and bronzed as their trophy, the hind-leg of an unfortunate cockroach, meaty, mute contrast to those who intend to be meticulous
As they devour all
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.
Children are notoriously voiceless, which is why Lindy West’s crusade to “shout your abortion” is so very tone deaf.
In this country and in many countries all over the world, women of childbearing age may have the right to kill their own small daughters and sons, but once that procedure has resulted in the death of a child, it no longer belongs to the mother to shout.
Mother–see how ironic that sounds.
We have to shout for…
…the voiceless girls
Who have lost their lives, their right to shout
For daughters
For sons
Forever missing
Their voices.
How do atheists turf their ghosts? Wispy girls, long gone, in their place, algorithms, aggregates, the trees were old back when we were young, how wise they will be when we have left this place.
Who will bear the children of the dead? Who will tell the grown man
How pretty, how young you looked in your operatic yukata, how many letters have been written for you, all for you
Careful, I say, careful.
measure out impossible prayers to a Most Evident God
As though they were
Leaves caught in the wind
I don’t know why they came then, at the heart of the hardest season of our lives, but we took them to the Aransas Wildlife Refuge. He sat in the back of the van with me and I made him do a Bible study about Jesus inhabiting hearts like they were houses, a Chinese box filled with simile and indelible pain. If I would write our story as a clever fiction I would insert a frumpy birdwatching stranger and I would accost her with my incoherent grief-
Anger is at the heart of love
overturning tables in the temple
In the house of God
The call costs five cents a minute and you have to be ready with a form of payment. On the other end of the line there is
A princess stuck in a well
Bears curled in around a wee-sleepy home invader
A girl in a badly blended family with a knack for the most inconvenient footwear
And all the rest of us-
sleeping beauties, garden-of-Gethsemane-tired
Of hearing about
This impending crucifixion.
The LA Times writes a puff piece on abortion doctors who travel to states like mine to kill the unborn.
Our Eichmanns
Our Holocaust.
Matthew 2:18 NIV
[18] “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
I call her name
Stalk the neighborhood
Take the dog
Print out sepia copies of
Her sleeping, staring pensively at the lens
Reminding of me the others
All gone missing
You look at wonder every day
For love or pay
I look for love
Every day
See the missing
You.
Forebear all hymns, celebratory, solemn, or liturgical
Just wash the stuffed animal
Mammalian, maternal
Using sewn-on paws to clutch
a miniature version of herself
To her belly, too big for an ordinary machine, she curls without consent into
The grey plastic washtub
Fetal position
I think, anthropomorphizing
Everything
All these years the ghosts have always been there, in our carved out hills of refuse, in our streams of once-living
Water.
–Federal Judge Has Blocked Texas Fetal Burial Law – NPR–
Carrying Light 