We swam through the news
Like a ship bucking at sea.
For a year our television
Was a lighthouse, blinking
Only in warning & never in warmth.
We felt ourselves things bred in the night,
Hibernating from our own humanity.
Grief made ropes of our arms.
This whole time, what we craved most
Was only all that we have ever loved.
The hours roved listless as a bike
Drunk without its handles.
Until.
When.
Back to normal,
We repeat, an incantation
To summon the Before.
We mourn the past
More than we miss it.
We revere the regular more
Than we remember it honestly.
Don’t we recognize
All the ways
Normal can
S p utt e r
&
Die.
Yes, nostalgia has its purposes—
Transport from the spectered,
The jobs never coming back,
The mothers’ primal screams,
Our children’s minds shuttered from school,
The funerals without families,
Weddings in waiting,
The births in isolation.
Let no one again
Have to begin, love, or end, alone.
The earth is a magic act;
Each second something beautiful
On its stage vanishes,
As if merely going home.
We have no word
For becoming a ghost or a memory.
To be a member of this place
Is to remember its place,
Its longitude of longing.
This elegy, naturally, is insufficient.
Say it plain.
Call us who we left behind.
It’s not what was done that will haunt us,
But what was withheld,
What was kept out & kept away.
The hand clenched tightly
With every black blow.
We cannot fathom all these phantoms.
But do not fear our ghosts.
Learn from them.
Slowly as the sea,
We found the stubborn devotion to say:
Where we can we shall hope.
We found it in a million delicacies
Of enormity—
An infant’s full-chested chortle,
July glassing our skin,
Music blurring a summered street.
How when we’re among friends
Our laughter can stomp
Up from nothing.
Through this hole punched in the roof
We can see a stitch of sky.
Our wounds, too, are our windows.
Through them we watch the world.
We prayed for a miracle.
What we got was a mirror.
Watch as, without movement,
We gather together.
What have we understood? Nothing. Everything.
What are we doing?
Listening.
It took us losing ourselves
To see we require no kingdom
But this kinship.
It is the nightmare, never
The dream, that shocks us awake.