Tag: children

flightless

& unseen

Kitty recovers, and so do I. It’s the last week of school, a time of dizzy rush underscored by reflection. I think about endangered creatures. One among these is the flightless parrot of New Zealand, the kākāpō. Who, according to Māori legend, is a protector of the land. And I am thinking about the children.

A system built for speed cannot see the slow one, who never flew. Who, when hunted, knew to freeze. I think of her, now camouflaged in shadow—an endangered hush—now subjected to another survey. Intended to express how well we care.

But a check mark is not shelter and a rubric offers no refuge. How many shine like saints in the chill grasp of their handlers, being measured for extinction while staying faithful to their flightlessness? 

I’ve learned not to trust anyone with a grand plan because I once had one, too. Now I only want to shelter who still lives. To protect a child’s right to become what they will, even if that becoming looks like myth, even if they call it pest.

I don’t know what school is, only what it is not. One metric involves how well a person can pretend to be a person deserving of award. But that is not the work.

The work is learning how to become, and some of the brightest know better than to obey.

Do it. Don’t ask. Shut up. Or we’ll fail you and humiliate your mother.

And in other news: Kids Fail Critical Thinking Tests.

Marcos liked to talk to old people. Liked to hear their lives. He couldn’t focus on any task that felt designed to domesticate his wonder. The first act of a critical mind is refusal.

Consider the ones who vanish as portraits in negative space: Now you see me. Now I disappear.

Now I am a vase, now I am two people kissing. Now neither. Now both.

You thought your five-minute survey could find me? Think again.

Ask me who I am before I speak.

Ask as if you believe I might not answer.

Ask as if you know the form of your asking matters as well as your question.

There is much I have not said. Not yet––and no, I do not plan to fly. 

I live close to the earth, as I am, in these shadows, or I die.

to find them

who live beyond measure

If children are disappearing it does not seem like a stretch to wonder if some have decided that there is no place for them here. Most of us are made of something that does not innately know its place & must be welcomed into being.

Let’s do more of that & more to read them, and more conversing with—and much less of the poking, prodding, scrutinizing “temperature checks” that are supposed to pass for paying attention to their needs & wondering why they look away.

How It’s Going

Marginal notes from the killing season.

I keep meaning to write a thing but my bones ache with a fatigue that calls to mind the early months of pregnancy. If it was that, this would be a different sort of note. I am driving in the mid-afternoon, alternately pinching my nose and my earlobes to stay awake. When I finally park, I think I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, and then it’s dark.

Democracy in the US is being dismantled from inside the White House but naturally everyone in passing periods between bells keeps on asking one another the usual questions. That is, when we’re not having clandestine conversations in which we agree to either pull the fire alarm if ICE shows up or at the very least to put popcorn in the microwave, set it for ten minutes, and walk back to class. Even though we think that the members of that organization would, if they had any sense or were at all in communication with local law enforcement, know better than to wear their jackets around here. We smile weakly while rushing to get in line for the single working bathroom between passing periods and say How’s it going? Like we don’t know. 

Oh, you know, we say back to each other. In a certain tone meant to indicate a wry awareness of a mutual understanding of professional obligation to carry on. With preventable infections poised for a major uptick, now by some measures is no time to start risking a loss of health insurance––except. But anyway, the kids are still here so who are we to go leaving now?

Where news is still being reported with any measure of integrity, it comes at such a rate and speed that you may find yourself shaking your head with a face in the posture of the sort of disgust that appears to be on the verge of a maniacal laughter, in response to a story that in a time not long before this one would have left you weeping.                               

And you thought yourself to be hardened before, having seen so closely so many sides of men you wished your children would never know. 

But here they are with their slick tongues and weak eyes, coming. The age of changing regimes with tanks and masked soldiers charging into conference rooms is decidedly passé. These killers walk in with khakis and polo shirts, bring donuts for the staff and fist-bump with the confidence afforded only to those at a certain level of remove from the lives of other humans, for reasons that some of us may speculate over, in likely error.

They perform experimental surgeries with words meant to anaesthetize unwitting victims. They call their actions simple cost-cutting measures for the sake of efficiency. They assure everyone they are only after criminals and grifters. Silently, in remote areas, off camera, construction continues erecting maximum-security concrete fortresses capable of housing whole cities. 

One wants to avoid hyperbole in a time like this. The truth is raw enough. But I can’t help remembering histories less than a century old, of another regime overseas, who once used similar language and parallel means––adjusted for context, of course––until arriving at the inevitable problem of exceeding the capacity of state-of-the-art holding facilities. The ovens, when they fired, were not some green monster’s evil plan, but the simplest and most efficient way of dealing with the practical problem of too many bodies than the holding centers could––as the saying went, process.

Which raises the issue again, that monstrous reality of human life and its perpetual inefficiency. The officials shook their heads. Their stomachs turned at the thought of what it meant to stay the course. Yes, of course,they agreed. They could fix this. Just wait, they said. It’s going to be something like you never imagined.

On a Feast Day

In remembrance

they banish the cameras to do this the news goes dark the news cuts to the shining hall of shining faces beneath the rockets red glare what unholy betrothal of lust and war begat this moment when the lens of the hour

is a gunner’s sight aimed at the child in the rubble of a former home who dares to call after a missing friend, come out come out wherever you are the bombs bursting in air what truth is this what night their eyes the children

have cousins who from the opulent lawns on the other side before the chancellors of progress scream because they still have breath to give and they fly it to the upper reaches of the towers to interrupt a runaway feast

breaking news their cry the news goes dark quick mute the drums mute the mouths easy their crime to dare protection of these least their trespass their refusal to wait until the tanks circle back the temple veil splits o god they call why––

and the names of the next murdered child to see in those faces themselves to hold to those towers a mirror long enough to heat some other flame above those unhearing talking heads they call those names

the living script for a new chorus, defiant wings against the winding updraft of this heat, eyes on the ground, on the babies the lift of them the song the theft they are skinny they call wide-eyed in the night until they stop

the tanks roll
the bombs continue
the children are in pieces now
the children are beaten
for disrupting the peace
more come

singing

Butterfly Wings Over Time

Now weather

how long have these tongues been training, gathering miles in this march?
all sinew and song now, seeding a note long overdue, stitched in the scars
of familial bones, now wind at broken backs where you fire at newborn ghosts

haunted by the children of the children you meant to unwrite but their names
were in the same hand as the first word and rhyme in this abundant night
now shining and porous with our open mouths the gates of a dream released

from these feet to our leaning crowns in the sight of what above your drones
past snipers’ tired talk of empty rights by which you vented brutal might this now when our huddled mass finds home in no-man’s-land of common exile

what horse for what discordant era now rides your conquest in reverse
what young hearts, annexed to your butchered beliefs beat back the boots
in which you shake behind armor to magnify your haunt without relief

lost pilgrim, it is time to take off your boots, unmask your eyes and stop,
unstop your ears for there is enough salt in our tears, enough light, to return
you to the land you lost yourself from when you rode off to claim the lot

no pilgrim, there will be no rest for these ghosts that haunt you for the land
so long watered by the slaughter of your making now becomes a rising spring
of remembrance in these open hands inviting your first word back to singing

by first light

What is Going

On breath

All that matters is–––what? Sometimes I cannot hear.

I want the children to be able to dream and breathe. I want their dreams for them, their breath, their dream breath back to them now, the winds restored where they were knocked out like a blow to the back. Sometimes at a birth a child will need to be reminded to breathe, but this is something else.

Sometimes at the death of children a collective body will need to be reminded back to collective breath.

It knocks now. Let some new wind be what this is, knocking back. Louder now. Everyone I see in passing in a workday says the same thing. I need to breathe we say to one another. A body deprived of oxygen will fade. A soul deprived of body will––what? Are these souls knocking about? Something knocks at my temples now. It will not stop. How are you? I ask the children, an opening ritual. Tired, they say. I am so tired.

These are our children. They are not breathing well.

All that matters is what will restore breath. All that matters is protection of breath, of dream. All that matters is rest for these knocking souls. We try to hold the thought.

Another round fires into the space again where we are trying, looking up, to remember a dream. Its noise pours over us like sand into our mouths.

To Hold Them

On the real work.

At the end of a long day in a long month, I read a hiring notice: Professional Cub Snuggler! it says, and I think, this is something. The work is to wrap baby bears in blankets, hold them in a coat while the mother gets a checkup. 

Now I can’t stop wishing that this was a model for some other things, the practice of stopping in the work week, no matter the job, for the most important work of the week. Time to hold the babies! everyone would say, and the babies would be held, and there would be enough hands so that the ones who had been caring for more babies than they had hands for could take a break and tend to other things, knowing the babies were okay.

There is a trick the handlers use, for getting the orphaned bears accepted. They cover the bark of a tree with a scented goo, and after the birth babies and the orphan run through it, back to mama, they all smell the same. And there’s something in this model, too. 

***

Inspired by this notice: “Dream Job Alert: Michigan DNR is Hiring Bear Cub Cuddlers.”

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