Bloom

 

In the midst of all this fear and heartache

Despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty

How could I not share this 2017 poem from Ada Límon, shared today by some algorithm and poets.org (on whose site you can also hear it read by the poet)? As current events make for a permanent knot in my stomach, the trees are busy doing what trees do this time of year.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Deliver us from evil

He chickened out, thank God.

Now how do we get him out before he does more damage? He destroys all he touches, and war crimes, nuclear threats, genocide and Bibi's "Gaza playbook" remain "on the table" for him and his enablers. 

Dot dot dot

I missed the chance to watch this moment live, but hearing about it from someone who did gave me goosebumps aplenty.

Hell reign

 

On Holy Saturday no less: blasphemous confirmation, if any more was needed, that this war criminal administration is in fact demonic.

Solar system

Someone's spontaneous subway effort to make sense of senseless war.

Merry Christmas!

A silver tree

Our weekly Lenten "Poetry & Prayer" gatherings wrapped up this morning with Mary Oliver again, having spent time also with Joy Harjo, Rumi and Christina Rossetti. Today's poem, suitable for Holy Week, was entitled "Gethsemane" (2007).

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did,
maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

It led to a lovely sharing or reactions, punctuated by sweet silences. We wept with the disciples, and took some wan comfort in the compassion of "dear bodies," "utterly human." Nature doesn't slumber, someone noted, so maybe Jesus wasn't alone in the garden at all. 

I was caught on the three "maybes" of the penultimate stanza, which is more fanciful than declarative and speaks the language not of nature but of miracle (not that those are necessarily opposed). If wind can stand still (in the form of a tree no less!) or a lake be still and solid as a "blue pavement," then is there hope yet for "the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut"? What hope? Is it in the nature of water or wind sometimes to stop flowing and blowing, "wild awake"? Did we know that? Do we know it now? 

We know how the Holy Week story ends, but those assembled in the garden didn't. And what is the part of slumping, weeping, poetizing humanity in the story exactly?

Isaiah 1:15

No kings III

 

Spent the afternoon with eight million of my closest friends...!

Possibly the biggest protest ever in the US?

 

The joy of the No King protests is in the handmade signs:

this is what democracy looks like!

Dioecious

 

Some red maple antics you won't see in the Lang courtyard