HOPE in a world OUT OF ORDER

🌹Howdy, Campers ~ and welcome to Poetry Friday! Today's poem and the link to PF is at the end of this post.

In this, our year-end round of posts, we will each share a favorite something we've read and would reccommend. It could be a book, a poem, a quotation, another blogger's post, anything that moved us, inspired us, thrilled us or taught us something.

So here's my truth: 

I am Jewish. 

I am terrified. 

In these frightening times, I want to give you...hope.

In yesterday's journal I wrote:

What I can’t figure out is how to hold the world in the palm of my hands. I used to be able to do that: listening to NPR each morning was a way of putting the world in order for the day. I don’t listen to it much these days. Can’t. It’s all bad stuff. I listen to My Unsung Hero and reposts of The Writers’ Almanac. I love the intro music of this podcast.

At first I was going to share Alison McGhee's October 21st poem of the week by Joseph Fasano. But that very human poem is too close to truth, too close to home, too dangerous, too deeply frightening. So I won't.

Through a dear friend, I came across  a letter in The Library of Congress by Helen Keller. 

image description (my words appear on torn paper):
As I read it, my heart remembered how to expand. It remembered that even in darkness there is great beauty. It remembered that humans can do miraculous things--like teach a blind and deaf child how to describe to another the sounds and sights of the 1898 World's Fair.

I hope reading her letter helps your heart remember, too.

(Below is a copy of the first page only of her typed letter; here's a link to all nine pages of the letter and a much easier-to-read transcript)

Dear Campers ~ I was planning to post yesterday's poem, titled OUT OF ORDER. When I read it this morning, though, it didn't seem hopeful enough to share with you. 

But the poem that found me today buoyed me. I hope it will lift you up, too.

Here's how today's poem walked in my door:

I took the following sentence from a newsletter and used it as a prompt:
“Ikaria is famously known as the place where people forget to die.”

Isn't that a wonderful quote?  Doesn't it make your fingers itch to DO something with it?

Here's how I started:

1) I typed the word FORGET as a temporary title.

2) I let my laptop keys out of their cages.

3) And off they galloped! 

Kitty, trying to catch the keys, galloping off...

Here's the rough draft:

NEVER FORGET

Forget that you’re in the nose bleed section.
Forget about the hotdog,
and that guy in the row below chomping on it.
Forget that salty, hot-doggy smell
which you’ll never get out of your brain

until...
Martinez hits a GRAND SLAM HOME RUN!
His bat smacks,
four runners score,
the ball soars,

to the kid in the red hat in a row far below
and a little to your right
who nearly catches it
but
drops it between the seats

and a nursing mother,
holding her infant securely against her chest with one hand,
kneels down and scoops it up,
deftly turns
and tosses it to the kid.

Forget the hotdog for god’s sake
it’s Martinez,
the kid,
the mother
that’s embedded in your memory.

Until today, that is,
forty-six years
to the day
when that salty, hot-doggy smell
wafts up

and a bat smacks,
four runners score,
the ball soars—then drops beneath your seat
and you, handing your beer to your buddy,
kneel down (oh, those creaky knees!)

scoop it up,
awkwardly standing and turning
to toss it to a random kid
in a red hat
whose face breaks out in an OHMYGOD! smile.

That, my friend--
that--
you will 

never
forget.

poem (c) 2023 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved.
===========

After several rough drafts, I re-titled it NEVER FORGET, because beneath everything these days is that terrible drumbeat. 

And yet...look what I found in hot dog and a ball game: hope. Imagine that.

I'd love to read what you create with this same prompt: “Ikaria is famously known as the place where people forget to die.”

Thanks for reading all the way to The End.

And thank you, Buffy, for hosting Poetry Friday this week!

posted by April Halprin Wayland, 

who misses 14-year-old Eli,
her licky, lanky, incredibly sweet dog 
(Kitty is mourning the empty space her big brother left, too)

Eli as a puppy, 2011

Eli swore he didn't do it...

Thank you, Cindy Derby, for this watercolor of Eli,
which captures his personality perfectly