Tabatha Yeatts hosts today’s Poetry Friday round up @ The Opposite of Indifference
The sky this morning looked dark and moody, not even the glimmer of sun lurked behind the hills of our valley. By the time I had my first cup of coffee and started out for morning chores, that dreariness had shifted into delight. Clouds were lifting at last, and it looked as though we were to be gifted with a fine day. Or so I told myself, and continue to tell myself, each new day in the shadow of this pandemic.
A few days ago, a beloved friend, the mother of two teenage children home for perhaps the rest of the school year, wrote to me. She said: “I’m grieving this morning for teenagers who should be social and developing their separated identities right now. I’m working towards understanding that I can no longer let school create our household schedule. It’s always been the center that other activities revolve around. Each day when I wake, I feel a deep sadness that requires strong coffee and the building of fortitude so I can do the work that needs to be done. We aren’t on a ship alone, but lately it can feel a lot like that, can’t it?”
Today I overheard one of my children talking to her father, describing what it feels like to live and work in Brooklyn right now – where the streets are eerily quiet, with stores and restaurants shuttered, and “normal” life seeming to be a thing of the past. It is hard to breathe sometimes, she said, I feel such a knot of anxiety. Implicit in all she said was a sense of dread about the future: what would it hold? how will it have changed?
There is nothing I could say of solace to either my friend or my daughter; we know that things will get worse before they get better, and things seem already so bad, so hopeless. My friend knits, my daughter does yoga and meditates, and these acts bring momentary peace. I guess that’s what I do every morning, too, when I wait on the path to the barn for the sun to rise in whatever fashion it chooses to rise. In that moment, I feel absolutely still and living in the moment. And, no matter what else happens as the day unfolds, I can always go back to the solace of that moment.
Waiting for the Present by Al Zolynas
I would sit in the dimness of my father’s wooden toolshed waiting for the mice to come out and feed on the wheat we kept
in a hundred-pound sack for the chickens.