April 16: Another Long Week, Days Getting Lost, Poem from "Kyrie"

It is late.  I am tired after another long week.

For most people, these days are blending.  More than one person who's in quarantine has asked me, "What day is it?"  Even the days are getting lost right now.

Loss isn't easy to navigate, big or little.  Easter has come and gone, and that doesn't seem possible.  However, all of the Lenten and Holy Week festivities that remind me of the coming of Easter weren't front and center for me this year.  Therefore, I lost Easter, too.

I'm losing sleep.  Money.  Teaching.  Reading.  Writing.  At the moment, I am simply consumed with surviving, as are most people.  And that will have to be enough for now.

Saint Marty is tired of washing his hands.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

How can she be his mother--he had one of those
and knows she isn't it--odd, stiff,
negative of her sisters:
                                    like large
possessive animals they are, grooming
the small inscrutable faces with their spit.

But here's the boy, culled from the loud clump,
and she can give him courtesy and work,
and since he seems to love to play outside

they work his mother's garden, grubbing out
the weeks and grass, the marginal and frail,
staking the strongest fruit up from the dirt.

Together they'll put by what they don't eat,
jars and jars of it--greens, reds, yellows
blanched in the steaming kitchen, vats of brine.