Only the Past, Over and Over
Like millions of others, I’m feeling hung over from the more-than-a-year process of passing some version of healthcare reform. I’m with the legions who believe the bill is flawed, but I’m also with those who believe that some reform is better than none at all. And for all those 32 million who will have insurance rather than nothing at all, I feel joy.
So, despite politicians of both parties doing their best to sully and stamp out efforts that aim to improve the lives of all Americans, I am momentarily content. Something has been done. Obstruction politics has momentarily failed. The greedy at the top have been forced to give up a sliver of their profits for the greater good.
So far, the country hasn’t collapsed. Nobody I know has had her taxes raised. No bogeymen have popped out of closets to destroy our very system of government.
It pretty much looks like business as usual, and we are all rats in our wheels chasing our tails. The arguments used against the proposed social security in the ’30s are the same ones used against medicare in the ’60s and healthcare reform today. We learned great lessons from the Vietnam War, and then forgot them all to scurry into its twins in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, we learn our lessons, we really do, but we learn so staggeringly slowly.
And yet, I believe we are evolving even as it seems we so often lose our resolve and our way. I take heart by recalling poems like this one by Gretchen Fletcher. I love the thought of dying (and living) with poems in my head, and the realization that the poems, once encountered, live on as energy, well past our capacity for remembering. So we share a moment’s revelation that nothing truly ends.
We have work to do, effort that won’t end at a wall, door, or accomplishment. The journey is long and terrifying and beautiful.
Recitation in Clover
My mother died with poems in her head,
the verses nothing more than electrical
connections no longer able to be made.
The lightning storms inside her brain that lit
her eyes are now become a firefly’s flash.
I wonder: Where has all that Whittier gone?
All those lines of Shelley she had learned?
Could Robinson and Guest be now just grass,
their energy released into the soil
as food to grow the oak beside her stone?
I will go now to sit beside her grave
and hear the locusts sing Wordsworth and Keats.
I’ll hear her voice in bees above the clover
and know my mother’s recitation is not over.
What a lovely poem. Thank you for introducing me to her.