January 21, 2025: "Possessed," A Bumpy Ride, "10 Versions of Hope"

Since yesterday afternoon, things in the United States have been a little . . . strange.  The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, and pronouns have been declared illegal.  Mount Denali has been rechristened Mount McKinley.  I could go on, but you get the idea.

It all feels strangely familiar.  We have now entered The Twilight Zone.  Again.

Sharon Olds can't escape her parents . . . 

Possessed

by: Sharon Olds

I have never left. Your bodies are before me 

at all times, in the dark I see 

the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns 

wheeling over my bed, and the darkness 

is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads 

over my crib, your body-hairs 

which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows, 

one by one. And I never leave your sight, 

I can look in the eyes of any stranger and 

find you there, in the rich swimming 

bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the 

blue that reflects from the knife's blade, 

and I smell you always, the dead cigars and 

Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming, 

the slow stopped bear tread and the 

quick fox, her nails on the ice, 

and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the 

coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts 

opening like jaws, drops from your glands 

clinging to my walls like pearls in the night. 

You think I left—I was the child 

who got away, thousands of miles, 

but not a day goes past that I am not 

turning someone into you. 

Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I 

turn now, in the fear of this moment, 

into your soft stained paw 

resting on her breast, into your breast trying to 

creep away from under his palm— 

your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails, 

your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

Olds is constantly being reminded of her mother and father, through memory and the eyes of a stranger and the tread of feet in a hallway.  No matter how long it's been, where she is, her parents haunt her daily.

Now, the United States is going through the same thing.  It's almost as if the ghost of our drunk uncle has appeared for Thanksgiving dinner, and he immediately sits down at the table and starts talking about JFK conspiracy theories and denying the Holocaust.  Buckle your seatbelts, folks.  It's going to be a bumpy ride.

The only way to combat dread and darkness is by embracing hope, in whatever form it takes.  Tonight, I hosted an event at the library called Words & Music for Hope--local musicians singing hopeful songs, local poets reading hopeful poems.  It was a full house, and, by the end of the evening, people were smiling and laughing.  

It was a good night, full of good people from the community who are really struggling with the Ghost of President Present.  They needed some way to exorcise their fears and angers.  I'm not saying everyone left the program feeling calm and confident about the future.  However, for about an hour and a half, everyone got a break from the Dementia Don show.  

We laughed.  We sang and clapped.  We hugged.  We hoped.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about sustaining hope, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:  

Instead of focusing predominantly on sight today, focus on taste, hearing, scent, and touch.  As you notice something that doesn't involve sight, jot it down in a notebook.  It could be "my hands smelled like pennies after digging through the change jar," or "heard a kingfisher calling over the sounds of waves."  At the end of the day, write a poem using your jotted down images.

10 Versions of Hope

by: Martin Achatz

It's the sun's warm fingers rubbing your neck on a 40-below-zero morning.

And your dog's sandpapery tongue licking your cheeks until they burn.

If you've heard silence buzzing in your ears like bees, that's hope.

That apple fragment, sweet as honeycomb, stuck between your teeth--hope.

Your furnace snoring to life in the middle of a January night.

An itch on your shoulder that your wife scratches into submission.

If you've smelled the musk under your arm in July, you've smelled hope.

Muffled laughter behind a closed door and onions steaming your eyes with tears.

Hope smacks its lips at dinner, loudly, when the bread is warm, dripping with butter.

When your 16-year-old son leans over, kisses your forehead softly, unexpectedly, before he goes to bed, that's hope, too.