I wrote a poem…

This morning I wrote a poem.  It’s working title is “Morning Prayer”…

“Morning Prayer”

Each morning she steps outside

Fills her eyes with sun rise 

Clouds  shape and color-shift  grey to pink

Low-lying like fog, high flying like cirrus,

A pale crescent moon in the western sky

the green green green of trees

She inhales fresh oxygen the ocean, 

redwoods, and the mother tree two yards over give every day

On days there are fires, she sniffs for it,

feels the tiny burn in her nostrils, from up north, down south, across the ocean

Remembers Santa Rosa, Paradise, Ojai, Australia

Is the Australia fire even over, no longer in the news as it is?

She prays.

“Help” she sings

Begging nature’s realm

Like the crows beg their morning alms.

She begs, her prayers carried on the wind by crows

What must the crows think? 

Soon they’ll bring her bits of breakfast

Thank you so much she’ll say, 

though food hunger was not her issue

She appreciates someone is trying to decipher and help.

Her human world is busy squawking about corona virus and

after all, more than 20 million died of the Spanish flu in 1918

It could happen again

She wonders what it felt like in Europe in 1933 when Hitler first came to power

When in 1933 the first “detention center” Dachau was established for “undesirables”.

She wonders what were the increments of the concentration of state power

its incitements to the “othering” of those not Aryan, not Hitlerian 

that finally led to Kristallnacht in 1938? to extermination centers in 1939?

There were 68 “concentration”, “detention”, “labor”, “transit” camps. 

She said —  I’ll name a few.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Bergen-Belsen

Kulmhof

Janowska

Majdanek

Treblinka

A few, she said, just a few.

She wonders what it felt like in America in the winter of 1861?

Before the Civil War broke out that spring?

She’s trying to figure out.

Did people know it was coming?  

Did they breathe the fresh air?

Notice the behavior of crows?

Pray?

The Civil War came, like the Spanish flu, only less lethal in the moment.

Only 620,000 died. Only.  Not the 20 (or fifty) million killed by a virus.

But more would die in a war that wouldn’t.

The way Confederate flags still fly.

The way 100 years of Jim Crow and lynching became a way of life.

A daily un-reported war.

Sustained.

The way slave labor continues in countless prisons across America today.

The way nothing — no evidence — can get a Black man to death row

The way everything —  endless evidence can exonerate a sociopathic Aryan billionaire

And everyone knows.  Everyone. Knows.

She worries, as she writes, that words

that true words

that women’s words

that crows’ words

that trees’ words

that poets’ words

No longer have currency except what patriarchal power deems so.

In this 1933 time,  this 1861 time. In 2020 time.

Can anyone’s words make a difference in such a reality?

Her questions out-number any inkling of an answer.

Still, she is willing to listen.  

And so each morning she steps out on her back porch.

Among trees and crows, she listens.

She remembers to breathe

and pray.

And stubbornly, she picks up her pen.

Crow, she writes. Tree.  Air.