#PoertyBreak: Small Kindness

Ordinary Angels (M.A. Reilly, Dublin, Ireland)

Small Kindnesses

By Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

---

Danusha Laméris is poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, Calif. Her next book, “Bonfire Opera,” will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

#PoetryBreak: Sorrow Is Not My Name

Counting (M.A. Reilly)

Thanks to Brian Mooney for sharing this poem. 

Sorrow Is Not My Name

BY ROSS GAY

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No

matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.

There is a time for everything. Look,

just this morning a vulture

nodded his red, grizzled head at me,

and I looked at him, admiring

the sickle of his beak.

Then the wind kicked up, and,

after arranging that good suit of feathers

he up and took off.

Just like that. And to boot,

there are, on this planet alone, something like two

million naturally occurring sweet things,

some with names so generous as to kick

the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,

stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks

at the market. Think of that. The long night,

the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me

on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.

But look; my niece is running through a field

calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel

and at the end of my block is a basketball court.

I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

      —for Walter Aikens

#SOL20 - The Obscene: Notes from the Pandemic

After (M.A. Reilly)

Tonight, I caught up on news.  Panic seemed to rule, as did the obscene. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told FOX News TV watchers that he preferred death over life if that meant getting people "back to work." Patrick told commentator Tucker Carlson,

“So my message is that let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it. And those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country. Don’t do that. Don’t ruin this great America.”

Patrick equates getting back to work, which in this case would likely create thousands and thousands of deaths, with getting back to living. He makes a dangerous proposition, one no one in service to the people ought to ever make, sound like a patriotic gesture that a John Wayne character might make in a film.

But this is not a film. Like it or not, this is a pandemic and we cannot control it by bluffing or bellowing like an idiot full of sound and fury. Patrick should step down. He is reckless, unAmerican, and his advice will get us killed.

Patrick's suggestion that America go back to work and ignore the Center for Disease Control's advice that the "best way to prevent illness is to avoid being exposed to this virus" reinforces the President's rambling nonsense about the cure being worse than the virus.  Trump announced in a two-hour blab-fest that he would re-open America for business in “weeks,” not months. 

So what happens if Americans go back to work like the President and Patrick are suggesting? What happens if Americans thumb their nose at COVID-19 and John Wayne their way back to work in order to boost the imploded economy?

See all that blood-red? That reflects the percentage of people who would likely be infected by COVID-19 by July 1, 2020 if we did as the President and the Lt. Gov. tell us we should do: Stop staying home and go back to work. Without control measures, the outbreak might sweep across most of the country by early May. By mid-May, it is estimated that new cases of the virus would reach 500,000 per day. 

The America that Patrick claimed to love would be no more. The economy would not have recovered and would now be in even worse shape as the country would be faced with out of control health needs and too few options to actually treat the sick.

More people would die because the President and his crony thought tough talk would effect a virus.

Patrick's question,  ‘Are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ is faulty. There is no individual in this scenario. His actions to return to work will affect scores and scores of others who will affect more and more people until the map of the United States is blood-red and our faulty decisions bleed that red across Canada and Mexico and from there it just travels on and on. 

That is the nature of a pandemic. It doesn't respect borders or border walls. It behaves as viruses behave looking for opportunistic ways to proliferate.

The advice from Patrick and the edict from Trump represent the forward way for a pandemic to claim a globe.