Ordinary Stories

poem written for an event

Ordinary Stories

 

Maybe we mistook

the myth of exceptionalism

for the reality of what being

extraordinary, really means.

It is not the number of Instagram

likes and a Christmas high-wire

circus act.

Our ancestors who survived

Depressions and concentration camps

knew about the art of ordinary

courage- tending plants in the dust

and grace in the everyday act

of baking bread. We lost so much

when we stopped listening

to the real stories. The ones that

mattered.

 

We built a world for the privileged

and repeated the mantras that rich dads

could afford to teach-

work hard, and like a hot-air balloon,

America’s convection currents

will help you rise; the right talent

agency will always find you. We forgot

that there is a different America

if you do not have the right kind of name

or accent; of you were born

a few miles across a manmade border;

the wrong school district or heaven forbid,

state or nation.

 

We said we’ll fix anything that breaks,

that is the American way, too; there is

nothing that cannot be replaced.

You, especially are replaceable,

so keep your head down

and we will pay you to sell your

voice to your superiors. Only a few

should afford beauty, truth, art, story.

I look, I see how, these four years-

we employed our doctors to wait tables,

our scientists, to work in debt collection,

our artists, sent to battle. We created

a space where only cruel and mindless

professions had a place, then asked,

how did we become so cruel and mindless?

We declared the creating of art,

the writing of poetry, a waste of time,

then asked why our children have no time

for stories unless they fit neatly

onto a violent movie screen.

 

We turned away from children

in camps and modern slavery, stopped listening

to the cries of the soil beneath our feet

in pain- so many uncaring men in heavy

boots standing on the necks

of people and lands they consider, inferior.

We forgot the words to describe how

it feels to watch humanity stripped away,

hour by hour, line by line, stanza by stanza.

Four years of nightmare, we struggled to define

because we lost the language of the heart.

 

At the end of the day, the human soul

needs more than food and warmth, it

demands justice too. Human hands need

to feel like they contributed something

of real worth

not just stock-market, value.

Human arms long to rock the dreams of

our children, into a restful sleep

for rightful action.

 

COVID maybe was

the earth’s poem to us; our last warning.

Written with the blood of our loved ones

on the open pages of a sky turning

to ash, 6 billion people did

what was never achieved before. They put

their responsibility above their

desire for comfort. The extraordinary

was achieved. We realized, there

are things you cannot replace.

 

80 million Americans were among them.

It was just barely enough.

The song they lifted up, what I heard of it,

sounds a lot like my grandmother’s

homecoming after the Depression.

A call to decency. A celebration of

bread bakers and cultivators of dreams.

A call to get our visionaries, our thinkers,

our restorers, our lovers of land and light,

our believers in good: all of them,

back to the important work

of creating a humanity we want

our children to live in. Of telling ordinary

stories in extraordinary ways.