Pandemic Prayer

Pandemic Prayer

We are not all left standing when the war has ended.
It feels like the end times.
For many, it is.
Inhalation is our first act of embodiment.
Exhalation, our last.
One lifetime, millions of breaths
a conversation with all existence.
Where does the spirit go when we die?
Hail Mary, my gentle Momma,
You left; you gave up your breath
before the virus could steal it.
You waged a long campaign to stave off
cancer, old age, and death.
Emancipating your breath
you added the gift of your spirit to all.
Holy Mary, you released your body,
returned to Earth, our suffocated Mother,
in respiratory distress for decades.
Humanity is a virus choking
and drowning our source of life.
When the host dies,
the virus dies too.
Momma, you returned to our Mother
so you could garden with Her,
to try to heal us all.

–Kathryn Harper

On this day six years ago my mother, Mary Catherine Nicklas Petro, died. She was 86 and had two types of cancer. In 2017 she was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma -- her third experience with melanoma. She began Opdivo, an immunotherapy. It was her good fortune that she fell into the 30% for whom the treatment worked. It shrank her tumors to almost nothing. About a year ago, her breast cancer returned. She had a lot of arthritis, mobility issues, and pain. Yet she kept going as long as she could with the Opdivo, because she wanted to contribute to the research on the treatment for the sake of others. The breast cancer returned, though, and she knew she didn’t want aggressive treatment for it. Her body was struggling enough with side effects and ailments.

Mom was getting close to entering hospice. We had imagined more time, a gradual decline, a process where we could see her again and say good-bye. Something happened inside her that day that led to a swift end. She is no longer suffering. I had talked to her three days prior, and I am so glad I did. We lived 3,000 miles apart. I lived in an epicenter of Covid-19, was sheltering-in-place, and am in a vulnerable group. I didn’t want to get it, and I didn’t want to carry it to my siblings or my elderly father. I spent a lot of time saying good-bye to my mother over the years, connecting with her, resolving things between us. I grieved some. Yet nothing prepared me for how that felt. The finality. May we all be peace; may we all be free from suffering. 

I Have a Sad

This is Misty, our rabbit, from younger days. She is doing what she does best: chilling. We adopted her at one year of age in March 2019, and she has been a silly, feisty, sweet presence in our family. 

Until this month, she has been in stellar health. We took her for a routine annual exam a couple weeks ago, and a mass on her left arm was discovered. The biopsy confirmed it is cancer. As prey animals, rabbits are rather fragile. Sometimes they even die under anesthesia. A domestic rabbit lifespan is about 8-12 years, and she is just shy of eight.

So our family decided it would not be kind to put Misty through a major surgery and chemotherapy. The x-rays show the mass embedded in the arm in such a way that surgery would not get the entire tumor. For the time being, Misty is as energetic as ever. She eats with gusto, her GI system works well, and she is her cuddly self. Her movement isn't hindered much at this point. We've opted for palliative care and all the rabbit treats she wants, and we'll watch her closely to know when her life quality has decreased. 

I've loved this little bun. And I feel heavy, knowing what is coming.

No Place Too Small

No Place Too Small

It is easy to know how to meld with so much grief.
With joy there is blindness, rose-colored ignorance,
No body to tend, to anchor one to the earth.
When the world remains intact, you move nimbly,
Caressing the surface of things, noticing little.

But grief burrows in.
It needs only the exposed, wounded soul
To dig in as a tick under skin.
Grief bangs around the cellar, shrieking,
behaves unpredictably, hijacking your eyes
When the store clerk asks how you are. Clutching your
throat when you call the dentist’s office for a cleaning.

You walk now among oblivious humans,
an emotional leper
With lesions rotting your heart.
All of existence has its own death,
It too could slip into a tumor-ridden coma
Adorned with catheter tubes,
And gasp last breaths to the sterile beat
Of a monitor, attended by loved ones.

Since there is no place too small
For grief to infiltrate,
You lie down, surrender, pull it
to every cell of your being.
You take orders, as a dog obeys commands
From an owner; you honor and bear it,
And in this way, endure.

–Kathryn Harper

This poem was another exercise in scaffolding. I worked with Naomi Shihab Ney's Kindness.

“Grief” by jan buchholtz, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Impermanence

 

Impermanence

A dead man’s photo peers over my bed
The silent witness who lives in my blood.
Absence is the soul’s starvation diet.
I have been hungry since before I was born.

Plan for madness to heal you.
Plan for sadness to fly.
Plan for hope estranging your happiness.
It surely will.

The finite hours and days,
The years,
Dissolve with relentless measure
And apathy.

This will grieve your heart but release it.
You must not pull back: too late too late to stop.
You carelessly left your spirit alone,
Now seconds plunder its secrets

And take all.
Life perpetuates a feeble trick
on the frail mind:
A creation of memes
Moved by predestination

To obscurity.
The clock lightly ticks and then cocks its gun.
Aims between your eyes.
Are you ready?

-Kathryn Harper

I used James Galvin's Post-Modernism as the scaffold. I attempted to emulate the pace, syllables, and sentence structure. It was a tough exercise and I enjoyed it. 

“Memorial image #2” by jodene e, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Crucifixion

Crucifixion

She wills him to leave.
He shred her with words and now
she is every slut who ever lived,
the Levite’s worthless concubine from Bethlehem
as she stands scrubbing under
stinging, steaming needles of water,
as she cooks him out from under
her flesh, now banana tender,
welting purple at the wrists, breasts, thighs.

He permeates her head, the
musky mushroom scent stubbornly
remains regardless how much
she retches and spits;
she bites the bar of soap as though
taking communion, seeking its promise
to trade cleanliness for evil.

She stands, trembling and heaving
from gut to fingertips
shaking bone deep cold,
and the blood,
the blood won’t stop,
evidence of a sacrifice
that was not his
to make.

-Kathryn Harper

“crucifixion” by Colectivo movimente, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Self-Care in Political Chaos

Someone shared this clip from PBS with me: The surprising way to fight political exhaustion, in which sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom talks about "agency" as a key to countering exhaustion from relentless horrible world news and politics. 

She's on point. It makes me think... if I'm standing still awhile, it starts to hurt and get heavy, my feet and hips ache, etc. But if I walk or move in some way, pain recedes. (I had a lot of retail jobs long ago.) Passive consumption of news forces us to stand and hold heaviness, which feels even MORE heavy because that's all we're attending to. I liked her term: agentic. 

This is why I've joined to volunteer with Action for Happiness, and why I've started making "little art" earnestly, on the regular, and why I'm returning to frequent entries here, and might even write poetry again. Since this post is public, I can't pretend I'll be a secret agent -- but I can be an agent for kindness. 

On Renee Nicole Good

On The Resolve of Minnesota

The Library, Mid-Winter

The Library, Mid-Winter

The library chair holds the shape of a body
better than the body holds the news.
Outside, the rain is a gray slant of percussion,
drumming a rhythm for a march starting 
somewhere south of our borders.

We ate eggs while discussing our work
of mending, healing hearts and minds.
We called out each other's blind spots
to examine, completely safe within
our connection of love and respect.

But it’s time to undress the Christmas tree,
to stow the baubles and lights, yet I dawdle.
The branches hold beloved memories
that visit once a year. There is no guarantee
I will unpack them again.

I think of the earth, waiting for the pine,
waiting for me -- to be turned back into
something that helps the flowers grow.

-Kathryn Harper

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On | Official Trailer HD | A24

If you ever get a chance to watch this quirky movie, you won't regret it. That is, if you enjoy movies about love, connection, grief, joy, and wonder.