Cushion the head
when it is too tired to lift
and stitch the shadow back
to her source.
To Set the Heart
On wants
Tag: sorrow
Birds and Our Windows
But where do the children play?
Sound bites fly in on the drive home and spend the night flying around. O god, a young woman says, there is no one left. O god, o god, she says. They are killing us all. Then birds against the glass of the dream window and children kicking, flushed, and fevered in their moving beds. We are moving, but where? Everywhere you can see the overgrowth of mechanic replication stretching its tentacles to our throats. The children will tell you. Ask them how they are, and they will tell you. I am tired. I am so tired, they say. The officials respond: we have more! So much more. The children are not sure about the water. There are rumors of lead. Of runoff. Human waste. They are sure, if you ask them to elaborate, that there is probably a camera somewhere recording them, making a weapon of their faces, their voices, to be turned against them at a future time, yet undetermined. This morning one cries quietly under his hood. I do what I can to keep the cameras from him. The sirens continue, the blast of alarms calling time. Officials reach measuring sticks and probes toward the bodies of the children. The children are backing away. Official talk revolves around the question of reaching them. Ways to bypass their resistance. In this world where the machine winds its algorithmic fingers toward their necks and birds crash against windows where the children are tired, I cannot help. Hoping. They are learning, I want to believe. To resist. But what? And how? They do not say what, not yet. They do not say how. I offer only words, poems. Music, metaphors. Try this? Or this one? I do not know what passes through. We continue, for now. Some of us, then fewer over time. How are you? We ask. And answer, so tired.
Neither Happy nor––
But here, happening how.
What would it mean to suspend belief in happiness as universal will? My allegiance is to the wretched, so I stand with the stranger, the exile, the banished. The despicable, the miserable. The sorrowful. And weep in defiance of the engine that would equate my fitness with an ability to maintain a distracted removal of my body from its cares. Let us weep together, and then. Let us join the children that they may not lose their capacities to be awed by the wonders and joys that will nevertheless persist, and must, for our continuance. In these we may delight often in concert with our griefs, as the salt of tears returns to laughing mouths. The range of this chorus of connection will not be boxed, packaged, sold, or theorized into anyone’s ten steps. None of these will hold. Only love. This is not the love of salvation by removal from pain. This is the love of immersion: in shit, and grief, and the stink of bodies, the relentlessness of our collective need, and the tedium and immensity of tending well.
***
The italicized opening line comes from Sara Ahmed, and has echoes across time and geographies, in Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, and throughout the Gospels.