Today mother transplanted herself to the back deck without the walker. It was the sun, her first time out since the fall. The verb falling, the fractures curing, her eyes closed when I joined her. “Days are becoming long,”
she said. And then in Punjabi: “Two birds. One calling. One giving the answer.” I know and she knows she has never heard these birds before. It took me some forty years to learn such songs myself. But today’s back and forth
feels like something new. The two-toned cardinals could be doing social work, averting warming, or slowing down time. Like that Chinese lake I read was flickering— alternating between its two states, dead or healthy—
taking twenty years to settle on one. The birds are gone but I’m still listening. One grandchild oscillates on the rusted swing set with past summers’ wasp nests thrice removed. Creak, creak. The visual is a sine wave which
becomes near-sighted near the end. I still use that trick I discovered in childhood: if I want to be cured of hiccups I pretend to badly want the next one. I wish some things would just die a little more in spring.
"When I wrote this poem, we didn't realize my mother had had a stroke, but those cardinals were telling me. I then began work on "This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart." In 2020, just before the book came out, my mother fell again. We discovered the undetected stroke from Spring 2018 in her MRI. It had been hidden in the shadows. That is the early warning signal of poetry."
"Once everything started shutting down, the Earth got a little bit of a rest. And then most of us shut down, and that takes you inside to a kind of reckoning. That’s what we’re all involved in right now—an Earth reckoning, a historical reckoning, a cultural reckoning, societal and social reckoning."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"When I first saw the bandelette in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, in Paris’s Marais district, I immediately experienced one of those Rilkean “bursts,” for here was an object, that in its ornate yet near-transparent being, invoked so much of the social, cultural and historic struggles of the Jews which are writ large across and infuse the whole of Western culture from earliest times through the rise of Christianity and the Church fathers, on up to the Shoah."
