Patriots Day Storm

Some days my faith, like the flag on a cloudy, muggy day is suspended like a deflated balloon. The still air should calm my innermost fears but without the wind my ears hear everything. The screams of my own childhood, The gunfire and bombs crumbling homes in Syria The panicked cries of babies unable to breath and the swooshing of the fire hoses as they try to remove the poisonous gas from the children’s lungs. The waves lapping at the overcrowded boats packed with children, women and men and their eerie silence as they make their way to the Greek Isle of Lesbos. The whimpering of children in cages, crying out for their mothers. When I was six I had strep throat. A fever kept me home all day to watch the Cuban missile crisis unfold on television. In the night I called out, afraid we were all going to die. My father came in and said it was OK, that I should go back to sleep. His words, like my affirmations of faith some days Didn’t soothe the fear I heard murmuring loudly around me. For three days we have gone to bed wondering if a nuclear war will have started while we sleep. In my America, we elected a trigger happy bully who is dismantling civility and giving permission for the demons in us to rise like a ghoulish nightmare talking death: billows of smoke, rape, walls of hate and discrimination. The safe places are disturbed by sobbing. Where does a lesbian feminist, mother of two black daughters go in a country that is no longer speaking Goodness? On my desk a post-it note in my own hand scribbles: "Who are my people and how can I serve them?" Some days the answer comes back quietly: “today, just you.” (The airline attendant reminds us “put the lifejacket on yourself first, then on your little traveling companions.”) I cannot cover my ears or shut my eyes to the despair around me. The 3-year-old body washed upon the Greek coast, his little pants and shirt looking like something I could buy in Target or Walmart. He is silent. But his clothes scream to me: “He is one of you!” Yet the collective “we” doesn’t hear, doesn’t see. I go to post Women’s March huddles where we talk about what we (first world women) need, while I hear other people’s children gasp their last breath. I have listened to the wind pick up in the trees at night, blowing away the storm clouds. The heavy air yields to a bright morning sun. In the day-after the flag flaps proudly in the breeze and fills my ears. Just for now, just today.