Category Poetry

                     “MOMMY!”

               By Andrew Hidas

The tiniest shortfall of a tiny hand,
merrily reaching for safety poolside—
and missing.

Fateful collision of lip and cement,
the gash gushing precious blood
staining red the waterwings designed
to forestall catastrophe.

Flurry of activity, lifeguards rushing,
the ice they bring serving as balm
for body and soul, halfway to the ER
his babble already resuming the
incessant joyful grrrrr of
trucks and dinosaurs.

Five hours later, exhausted and
asleep on his mother’s chest,
darkness abiding, the team finally assembles,
doctor, nurses, interns, respiratory therapist,
eight persons forming a semi-circle
of solemn duty.

The shake and tug to coax him awake,
grasped by multiple hands descending,
his sudden panic beyond all soothing,
needle in the right leg, needle in the left,
“MOMMY!” comes the deep desperate
wail to she who is dear...

The world will be what it will be for human beings—never static, always a hot churning mixture of hope and despair, beauty and carnage, good works and evil deeds. Some eras, though, seem perched on a particularly thin knife’s edge, the odds of falling into a hellish pit rather than a featherbed being higher than normal. Signs seem pretty strong we are in such an era today.

Given the deep and angry divisions currently confronting not only our country but the larger world,, we’d be fools not to worry for its future. We’d also, of course, be fools to worry all the time, to let that worry diminish us, see us give in to disconsolation and despair.

But that is its own fine point at a knife’s edge, isn’t it? Finding room in ourselves to be both sober and carefree, attentive and dreamy, worried and hopeful. Burying our head into neither the warm sands of boundless optimism nor the cold dungeons of eternal gloom.

It’s been more than a decade and 500+ posts since we last visited in this space the Chinese-rooted, Indonesian-born, American-raised (since age 7) poet Li-Young Lee and his much anthologized, gorgeous peach of a poem, “From Blossoms.” Fortunately, Lee, now 66, remains above ground and has continued to write in the intervening years. Even more fortunately for me, so have I.

So it was a happy accident last week when I came across his poetry again while looking for something else and got thoroughly distracted from whatever that something else was as I landed upon “Arise, Go Down.”

Unlike “From Blossoms” and its ecstatic, sense-drenched celebration of the peach-eating experience as a form of divinity, in “Arise, Go Down,” Lee explores more of the shadowy, yin-yang, to-and-fro of existence...

The spiritually inclined 20th century psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of “synchronicity” is in the driver’s seat with this post. After I began assembling another selection for this blog’s “Brilliant Songs” series, I thought the better of ignoring the long-deceased Dr. Jung’s clear message to me across space and time to veer over into the poetry realm instead.

Perhaps I should explain.

My blogging friend over at Loren Webster.net is a longtime birder whose post the other day featured, among other winged creatures, the gorgeous portrait of the red-shouldered hawk that you see below. After admiring its fierce, self-possessed bearing before retiring for the night, I awoke the next morning to my customary and most welcome “Poem-a-Day” from the American Academy of Poets gracing my email in-box.

And what do I find there? The heading, “Red-Shouldered Hawk by Ciona Rouse.”

Well…

Jung developed his concept of “sync...