Start Singing Again

Navigating the cascade of challenges this pandemic has wrought, even understanding my incredible good fortune, has taken its protracted toll. Our country’s substitution of vituperative petulance for governance has taken a toll. & personally, reaving ourselves from the landscape that meant so much to us, too. I am generally taken up in the current of each day, passing from one of the kid’s exigencies to the next, from cleaning breakfast plates to closing their doors finally at nightfall, ready to gasp for some shred of quiet, for some touch of mindlessness. But these days, I can’t stop looking at the awfulness of humans, can’t stop feeling its insidiousness, tendriling around my heart & lungs & chest. A country in such dire need of the most basic expression of empathy & the simplest postures of grace, instead a maelstrom fanned & flamed, a turf war riddled with the dead & dying, & something so much more than politics happening, something like negligence, something like the wanton, craven waste of human life. 

I am a father in the midst of this. I cannot metabolize these horrific times & spin them into sense for my children. I am charged with an architecture of hope in a climate that actively repeals its foundations. Tasked with patience & care in a society busying itself with the denigration of both. What dreams am I to foster in these kids? Where can I point to say that, that is how you’re supposed to conduct yourself, that is how you walk through this world, balancing all of your joy with your anger, your kindness with your rage, your purpose with your injustices, your love with your hate? Where can I point to the dissolution of those old rigidities, to some beating heart of the world wherein those dialectics collapse & we are not housed under the rubric of how we’re permitted to feel & be, struggling for air? I can only say I’m sorry, children, but we have all collectively chosen to build our homes in the eye of this violence & torsion. We have elected bile & poison, cowardice & empty treachery. We put our children in cages. We breathe death into the faces of hope. We run black paint over declarations of love. We cannot abide a soaring heart, a proud stride, a knowing embrace. We look for our success only in the interstices of everyone else’s failure. 

Children, I know that thrumming in your chest there is a song that glides through your days, lithe & warm. I know that you would have it rhymed, have it coupled, hear it the world round. I know you would unburden us all & let us sing, too. I wish so fervently that we knew your language, could conjure it from an old, forgotten melody & let it brighten in us & fill us with your light. We have filled our ears with venom, & sieve our song through the syllabaries of decay. We have ceded too much, & the weight of it grinds against us now, & we watch it happen & wonder when it will stop. Maybe you will have to stop it, years from now. There is no fairness in that, nor kindness, nor gift, but there is hope well-founded in your light. 

Maybe we are flotsam deployed to stem the tide, to halt the crushing progress of so much unforgivable acrimony. Maybe we can grind it to a halt, dug in, pushing back, & wait for the sound of your song. I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to give you a world without apology, but I am thinking you will have to take the world without apology instead, & your heart will spell out the antidote, & all of this querulous, clenched coiling can ease & subside. Cast the shadow that kills its roots. Take the light for your own. Start singing again.