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The Justice Dept on Netroots Radio Presents: "The World is Burning" [1]
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Date: 2023-03-12
Again this year I’ve failed the peonies that came to us
when we bought our house in summer, not knowing what
pink and white glory grew in the northwest. After the first May,
still childless, seeing how a single bloom could overflow
the cup of my hands, the stems bowing to the ground
under their weight, I bought cages to circle the red shoots
after they crowned but only used them once. Arrow-like
as they emerge from the earth, the just unfurling leaves
look like fingers, reminiscent of intestinal villi and sea anemones,
moving with unexpected purpose. It is the force that through
the green fuse drives the flower, drives me to try and fail
again to conceive, which turns the leaves green, my eyes green,
everything greening and growing before my scaffolding
is in place. Again this year I’ve failed, but I haven’t been outside
in eight weeks without precautions against “the sickness”
as we’ve come to call it in our house, long days spent only
with my children, four and six, and my husband. A surly demand,
a dropped dish, misplaced keys, and I find myself wearing a crown
of overtowering rage, like the sun’s corona flaring,
the outermost layers of atmosphere flung violently into space,
invisible to most instruments except during a total solar eclipse,
as in 1869, when scientists detected a spectral green line,
possible indication of a new element they called coronium,
but in 1943, that grassy green was identified as iron
in a forbidden transition, half its electrons stripped away
by heat exceeding a million degrees. The world is burning
while I drift in a bubble of comfort but seized by anger
day after day until one evening I step out to find the peonies
that have managed to stay upright now reach my hips,
the pinks already perfuming the air, the whites still closed
tighter than a fist. The next morning I wake
with my grandmother’s voice in my ears, something
about mislaid glasses, and for long moments, I can’t recall
if she’s dead or alive. When I remember she’s gone,
I sob, unable to control my shudders, waking my daughter
who uncurls from my side and asks, “Why are you crying?”
How to explain the weight of loss pressing down
after a brief reprieve. The weight of a knee on a neck.
Children in detention while pandemic spreads. I don’t.
Instead I say, “I miss my grandmother who died.”
She gently pats my cheeks, then presses her forehead
against mine, so close all I see is the dark Cyclopean
blur of her eyes. Maybe it’s better to be unmoored
by rage and grief, to burn away that which binds us,
enriching the earth, making space for new growth.
Maybe my inability to cage a living thing isn’t
a failing at all. Better to let the green drive us
in a wild unfettered tangle, blooming or not,
to feel the comfort of my daughter’s touch, the renewal
of pain a small price for my grandmother alive again
in my mind while the peonies dive headfirst into the dirt.
[END]
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