Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Thunderstorms last night, and the Ruckus got caught in the rain and came home with his hair sticking out every which way and smelling like an old sock.

This morning, tales of children separated from their parents plaster every news source. They're actors, Ann Coulter claims on Fox News.

Because there are no better actors than three years olds caged away from their mothers.

The cruelty and the lies. The pretense that seeking asylum is illegal. The purposeful fracturing of families.

Meanwhile, I am laughing about my cat, and sitting in a quiet room, and planning my work day--and how can one mind grapple with the horror and the anger and peaceful and the quotidian? And with knowing, without doubt, I would have died if someone had tried to take my boys away from me.

This post is fractured because America is a humiliation and America is hope, and lives go on and lives halt, and we live in the present and in the past, in ourselves and out of ourselves, and it all happens simultaneously, and I'm only a poet so I don't have the first idea about how to solve it . . . except: where is the kindness?

3 comments:

David (n of 49) said...

"About suffering they were never wrong / the Old Masters..."

"Where is the kindness?" - Bravo.

David X. Novak said...

Perhaps this should be edited to "if someone had taken" instead of "if someone had tried to take" which sounds a little soft and doesn't reflect the situation in the camps.

Obama tried earnestly to resuscitate hope but we appear to be witnessing its last gasp. Asylum seekers were hopeful, but this sure dashes that.

Dawn Potter said...

"If someone had tried to take" was my grammatical way of trying to imagine living inside the action of taking. You're right that it doesn't not reflect the harshness of the simpler past tense. It's good to think about how our grammar choices soften or harden what we are saying.