As we face another upsetting reality regarding Covid-19 and the Delta variant causing another increase in infection rates and hospitalizations, conversations about public health and mask wearing, I feel the weariness that you most likely feel too. As we face the reality of corrupt power and sexual abuse and violation, of the threat to our freedom of voting and protection of rights, I feel the weariness you most likely feel too. I heard an interview with the author, Clint Smith, and he read this poem he wrote regarding continued injustices and violence towards black and brown bodies. I think it’s important at times to give language that bears the weightiness that is reality. From there, we can free up psychological resources to move forward.
When people say, “we have made it through worse before”
— Clint Smith
all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who
did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to
convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe
does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,
do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies
that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.
