When birds leave first
You don’t know.
Here is the ordinary paradise. What
you expect of checkers, the moves you mark,
blessed ordinary choices made.
What color socks, scanning the landscape
and what will please your tongue, maybe
that box of cereal, a bowl, some milk.
These shoes seem to fit your life. You
pull tight the laces, big loop goes around
and the sky paints thoughts blue.
Then. There’s always a then.
What’s that sound at the back of a perfect
thought. Yours alone? Read their eyes.
Other faces begin to say, doubt has a name.
Arriving like a wave, recognition has found
your face. We run like wind would do.
Towards or away from, some burning
need, a dull aching breath, inside this fog.
We hold tight whatever tree seems strong.
Then scattered clothes, holes in snow,
what memories are. Translucent grace.
Smoke become faint, laying on the ground.
Faces that seemed far, now inside a single
gasp, a breath that doesn’t stop. Elusive
now, turned to rain gone down the slope.
You don’t know how to plan, anything, anymore.
The day is blue the sky is clear, a child is gone,
a wife, a mother, a marriage torn,
the face who brought you water in a glass
fallen now back beneath the sand. Some
stranger wraps a cloak around your snow.
This is how paradise is. This is how life
takes a breath and another and another.
This is how you live. How you go on.
You gather what scarred hands can find.
I don’t take care of my fears anymore.
neil reid © december 2012
This poem is written in support of the open prompt at We Write Poems, Writing for Healing and Peace (in series as presented).
Both that prompt and this poem here are offered and meant in a more general sense. While the initial spark was from that elementary school shooting in Connecticut, there are more than enough other incidents. In a manner I take that event as a sort of natural disaster (albeit by our own hands), and however harm comes, the sense is much the same, what seems lost in aftermath.
So here this poem, the images, the movement are annealed of several such experiences. Some of the phrasing is directly as shared by one of the survivors from the great south Asian sea tsunami a few years back.
`some stranger raps a cloak around your snow’
`I don’t take care of my fears anymore’
Two extraordinary lines, Neil.
Thank you, thank you. Yes to both lines, especially the last. The balance of the poem was meant to be rather “ordinary” with some slow dull changing to confused distress. Newtown was in mind, but for the most this poem comes from a mother who was deeply caught up in the Indonesian tsunami – washed inland with one of her sons, adrift in danger and apart from another son and husband both, not knowing if they were even alive.
Out of that utter confusion, the first “act of kindness” received was from a local Thai woman who wrapped a blanket around her. How much that so so simple act meant to her.
The last thing she said in interview was literally the last line of the poem, word for word. That was her “sum” of the experience (and yes her husband and other son also survived). How much the many of us “attend” to our fears in one manner or another, using up so much of our energy and care. Her resolution, her healing, was in giving up that essence of life given over to fear! The whole poem really exists simply to support that one statement of hers. An incredible statement of a life purified by water!
And my wish for all of us. Thanks again for reading and your comment.