Right now, we are in a transitional world, upside down in our values, experiencing the hottest days on our planet and the most confusing and dichotomized (is that a word?) society. I am aging. At 74, my heart and my body hurt a lot of the time. We’ve survived a pandemic together, but somehow also apart. That experience has re-sculpted our way of life. Gorman’s poem felt as if it was torn from me. Here it is.
Hymn for the Hurting
Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.
Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.
Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.
Before I had read her poem, I’d written a poem about the pain we carry. It might be an answering echo of Gorman’s, except I can’t time travel. Here’s mine:
If you could find it, it was one-ply,
thin as the supply chain when ships
backed up into the Pacific Ocean.
When we conserved because
who knew what arrive next.
It was a one-ply world, gallons
of basics like milk missing
from grocery stores, a mass graves
and million dead kind of year.
A year when we sewed our masks
and daily checked our foreheads for fever.
But now we’re booking flights to Paris
and Rick Steves has made a comeback.
Though store shelves are still gap-toothed
some days, we’re leaving that old world
of scarcity and sheltering
on the usual one-way ticket of time.
We’ve achieved another world,
though pandemic change is now endemic,
with new ways of working and talking.
Would you even want to go back
to the mythic before? The normal we kept asking for.
I don’t wish to sweat at the wheel
on an inching, exhausted highway
commute to my cubicle high in a smoggy sky.
I don’t yearn to again fear the breath
of the people I pass on my evening walk.
I do miss the world of chalked cheer
on streets no longer used by cars,
pavement pecked by crows,
and a downtown mall browsed by deer.
I miss the signs saying
all of us must care for all of us.
I wouldn’t go back to that other before,
the one even more divided than we are now,
but I can’t imagine what’s next, in a world
where a wildfire or hurricane might spring up
more often, yet meteors of kindness
are also daily incoming.
How do we envision
our new kind of one-ply world?
Where we cherish each other and everything,
not for its scarcity but because we feel the sharing
is truly now imperative in a world of knowing
we must give life to one another
if anyone is to have life at all.
~ Rachel Dacus, 2023
