TWO-HOUR DELAY
It’s February and already
I’ve overspent my budgeted bewilderment
for the year, most of it on deep & constant
sorrow: war, deportations, deployments, hatred
forged into policy, theft, dead phone lines
and locked doors. I’ve seen more planes fall
from the clouds this winter than snow. So,
for less than an inch of scattered flakes across the city,
our superintendent delays schools for two hours,
and before I fill them with what I have in excess—
lack of amusement, a backlog of worry, and work—
my daughter runs outside, gloveless, hatless,
and all I can think is how lucky she is, at least,
not to be named after industry or my assumptions
about her purpose on this planet. When I read
about the young couple practicing eugenics
in preparation for an apocalypse, the mother’s
ridiculous straw bonnet and father’s smug face
don’t make my jaw drop. My eyes don’t widen.
Belief is the new disbelief. Grief, not shock,
is this year’s renewable resource, and baby,
the harvest looks plentiful. My daughter returns
to show me how she scraped together
just enough sidewalk grit and ice to sculpt
a snowman the size of a pigeon. She props it up
in the weeds we call a yard and it stays for days,
long after the sun revokes what’s left
of the frost and glitter. It delights us without
the burden of surprise, which has never improved
anyone’s life, or built a single beautiful thing.
—from Poets Respond
__________
Abby E. Murray: “This poem happened instead of the incredulity I once felt as I stayed informed about what was happening in the U.S. There’s so much disaster to witness (such as the recovery of the wreck of flight 5342 in the Potomac, or this rising ‘trend’ of fascistic pronatalism), and many of us are in this strange new place of no longer losing time to the experience of shock—but we aren’t desensitized either. We’re feeling everything, just without the delay of disbelief. It’s simultaneously disorienting and intensely revealing.” (web)
