November 8, 2016

Remember the Trump signs that appeared like mushrooms overnight, shocking in their foreignness, isolated on the traffic island, and how they could not shake your faith?

Remember the pungent blue of the sky that day, and how you and your daughter wore white and borrowed a white dog with a blue bandana and rode to New Hampshire to knock on doors where no one was home in a town full of likeminds?

Remember the signs on the lawn of the houses you didn’t knock on, the interstitial ones on the way to and out of town, so you thought they didn’t count?

Remember the cake you baked for the party that turned into wake?
Oh, we woke, all right.

But I would not trade anything for that day, for my naïve hope. Because was it even a fake? As we have been learning these four years, the truth belongs only to the story we weave. Divorced from gravity, we all float above the world now, in magic carpets braided with conspiracies, tapestries reflecting back all the myths we grew from, all the myths we steward, all the fears we inherited.

For today, I will float and wait and weave and dream and search for the signs and hope I can find my way home.  

Many of my dear friends and fellow scribblers are writing daily these days, and maybe you are too. We’re part of a longstanding tradition called 30 Poems in November, and we write to raise funds for the work of Center for New Americans, a local non-profit that supports newcomers to this country on the level of goods, services, helpful information, English lessons and more. I am posting first drafts of my poems daily on my blog, although I am defining “Poem” loosely. I would be grateful if you would sponsor me and/or another poet. All funds go directly to Center for New Americans.