When A Poet Is Silenced
You write.
Dear Friends,
It’s been some time since you’ve heard from me. Illness knocked out all my energy, and I’ve spent the past three weeks flat on my back in bed. Because I rarely get sick, I have to reach back to the 1968 flu pandemic for a parallel.
I was twelve. I hallucinated. I thought I was attacked by a giant plush White Rabbit. It was my brother, playing Jefferson Airplane on repeat.
I wish that today, I was only hallucinating.
Minneapolis/St. Paul is my home, where I’ve lived all my life.
I’m not here to bring darkness. You’ve had plenty of it.
“I’m not mad at you.”
~ final words of Renee Good
Six days ago, I wrote the poem that follows. I woke up. Crashed, woke up, crashed. Wrote. Crashed.
Now, I’m awake. It is what poets do. We wake up and write.
Ice is not safe; it won’t spare you
when four tires hear separate shouted instructions
nothing stops the skid, a three-point turn
into what happens. A physician
steps from the crowd; arms up, hands
empty of all but do no harm
and is turned away. We have our own medics.
Mittens clipped to her six-year-old’s cuffs; her own hands
raw, bare. The snowball’s paused in play, in air —
that last wave to her son, as the school bus
pulls from the curb. The poet goes indoors, sits at the kitchen table
reaching for the right meter, light feet tapping hummingbird, happily —
not expecting the full, the final stop.
It’s cold today. But in my neighborhood, there’s warmth. The messages go out, the email chain: Let’s get together. Hold each other. Talk.
Toy animals spilled from the glove compartment.
To remember the small details of someone’s life is to honor them in death.
Beware of darkness, friends.
Love, Mary
Tell us your thoughts in the Comments. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking. About the events unfolding in our world, yes. But most of all, I want to know what you and your friends and neighbors are doing to take care of each other in these difficult times.
Thank you to all for reading. A heartfelt welcome to the many new subscribers who’ve found me within the past weeks. It uplifts me to know you’re here. This work gives me more joy than any I’ve done in my life. You, dear readers, sustain me.
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“not expecting the full, the final stop.”
I wish that line wasn’t so perfect. I wish it didn’t need to describe what never should have happened. I wish that as poets we didn’t have this calling to make the ugly beautiful. That’s not quite right. Because we also show the ugly as ugly. But finding the beauty of just the right words to fit the ugly things of the world that we cannot look away from. Sometimes that affirmation feels almost like denial. Except it isn’t really. I’m not sure what I want to say, except that I’m grateful for your words because they touch me to the heart.
It's quite somthing how the evil that's been at least partially restrained seems to have broke through its bonds and now pours out like sewage spewing from a rusted culvert. I've got to wonder if we've reached terminal velocity for malfeasance.
If evil prevails when good people do and say nothing, then this forum is at least doing what's right. We need to figure out, though, how to break down the walls of the echo chambers and get truth into the ears of the ignorant and the foolish.