Other People's Poems

"The Guest House" by Rumi 

"The Invitation" by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

"The Journey" by Mary Oliver

"Litany for Survival" by Audre Lorde

"Nikki-Rosa" by Nikki Giovanni

"Ordinary Heartbreak" by David Levine

"Pain for a Daughter" by Anne Sexton

"since feeling is first" by e e cummings

"somewhere i have never travelled" by e e cummings

"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

"True Love" by Robert Penn Warren

We have been telling you 
this is not a country safe
For a trans person to walk alone
For a black person to drive alone
For a woman to say No
to the wrong person
We have been telling you
that the refugees who do get through
say that surviving here
as poor people of color
with limited English
is harder
than what they survived
to get here
We have been telling you that
all of this has been happening
all of this time
before photo phones and social media
got you thinking about it
We have been telling you
how common open bigotry is
how dangerous latent prejudice is
and you did not really believe us
because of your own latent prejudice
which includes the latent classism
that had you believing
that the end of the factory town
and the end of family farm
and a generation of blue collar youth
marching into military hell
so they could have a place to eat
were sad things happening somewhere else
that wouldn't affect your life.
So, NOW you say 
your idea of America has been destroyed?
Well. Thank God something good has come from this.
America
was always a becoming
America
was never a prize in hand.
Go get some Langston Hughes in one hand,
and a shovel in the other--
We are ready to work beside you 
when you are.

Portraits

Had the grace of a ride home today from Hashana Rabbah services, so proud of my little guy who made it through the whole multi-hour liturgical maze that we use to set the final seal on our Season of Repentance. Absolutely endless circular marching to the refrain of hoshia na, save us, please!; the strongest people among us exhausting themselves standing straight with the weight of the Sefer Torah in their arms; the final laughing cathartic thwacking of the fragile willow branches that we have tended so carefully this past week, whacking them until all their leaves fall off (let it go), all culminating in this tremendous feeling of closure, of having done all that could be done. And then the grace of a pleasant ride and a rare chance to catch up with a friend, instead of the always weary and lonely wait for the bus. Then we, my boy of joy and I, are walking in the sunshine on our own turf, past the piles of red leaves our neighbor has cleared from the sidewalk. I see that the police had the mercy to leave the orange car in place when they arrested its homeless owner last night, and I am filled with gratitude on behalf of the two other men who take turns sleeping in the car, and hope on behalf of its owner who now stands a chance of being released released and able to reclaim his one lifeline before it is impounded and gone forever.

As we walk past the car I see the man currently sheltering in it with his sleeve pulled up and rolled tight thwacking the inner skin of his arm trying to raise a vein. And the whole world of desperate people dying by inches with no chance at all of getting what they need crashing down on me.

HOSHIA NA! HOSHIA NA!

Rungs of Exhaustion

There are rungs of exhaustion.

There's being so tired you can't do what needs to be done efficiently.

There's being so tired you can't do what needs to be done at all.

And there's being so tired you can no longer track what needs to be done.

Sometime last week I hit the bottom rung.

Untouchables

It's been a year now since my husband was retraumatized in a state ordered exam, carelessly conducted by an examiner who began with the assumption that he was making up his symptoms.

It's been a year since he could touch or be touched by anyone above the age of reason, including me, without dissolving into shakes and dry heaves.  

A year, since we had a way to reconnect, to mend and recenter after the daily words that can only pull us apart, my daily desperate battle to maneuver us all into position to get through the very real daily challenges that his swiss-cheesed brain cannot see, my snapping at him to get back in sync after he has leapt to respond to the shadows of his own fears.

I dream of his touch,  I dream of us making love again; I dream of him telling me that he is done trying and that we will never touch again.  I dream, and I wake up bare inches from him.  Sometimes, in the night, he sprawls and the backs of his fingertips touch the back of my arm, and I freeze, for as long as it lasts.  That did not happen in the first months.  Even in sleep, he would convulse awake in panic.

He hasn't had stable mental health care since early summer.  Even then the facility was understaffed and could only schedule him every two weeks despite his care plan requiring multiple sessions a week.  In summer, the low income transportation service went from bad to worse, botching every other pick-up and destroying his ability to get to and from what appointments he could get.  Now the facility lost more staff and nothing is happening for two months, not the promised intern, not the promised trauma specialist, and not even a regular counselor-- just the twenty minutes even six weeks to get his meds checked.  No support for progress.  

He has no fear of dogs, cats, and very small children, including, baruch HaShem, our own-- but how is it affecting our small child, to have parents who never touch, to see no affection in his home that is not centered on him?  How does it affect our boichik's sense of empathy and peace, to be able to see us break down but never to have a visible sign that things are all right again?  But things are never all right again.  Touch was how we made them right.

Working Women

I was a teen when I first heard a boy, blue collar, say how there was no way his future wife was ever going to have to go out to work.

It has taken me this long to understand, when a blue collar guy says such a thing, what he means is that his wife is never going to work on her hands and knees scrubbing someone else's floor, never going to stand behind a counter for hours until her feet swell so bad she has to put up her feet for an hour before her shoes will come off, never going to lose her fingers or eyesight in a factory, never going to bend her aching back over one more table, and never, ever going to be groped, and spat on, and screamed at by those who control her pay.

Because that's most of what blue collar women's work is.

I knew what I was hearing was sexist; I didn't know the way I was hearing it was classist.