Margot Wizansky

I’m walking under a sky dense with cloud cover.

Sunset flames as the cloud breaks open.

Stripes of water glimmer pure cobalt

through a stand of evergreens.

A few trees hold onto their brilliance.

Ahead on the road, a buck turns to look at me

while I listen to The Great Mortality on my phone,

history of epidemics, hysteria and blaming in the Middle Ages

and on to the centuries that followed—Jews

caused the plagues—shoot them, burn them!

No need for trial or even accusation.

I pass my neighbor’s truck wearing a sticker that signals

this year’s rumbling and shouting—Trump is Still My President;

As a Former Fetus, I Choose Life; Take Your Covid Vaccine

and Shove It—connected underground

like mushrooms, extending across the country,

hate that can show its face any time, drive its truck into a crowd.

The earth chokes from the hate. I feel it in my bones

as I walk lonely under that fiery sunset.

In the yard, a swarm of swallows zig zags,

gathering for the southward flight.

All is quiet except the birds.

I’m still in love with this world,

how it goes on while we try so hard to trouble it.

in the ongoing,

if I still bother to snap off the geraniums’ dying leaves

and prune and water, and they winter through

to bloom again,

if the scuttle of autumn fades golden to brown, winter

strips its color, and spring lifts yellow-green heads,

if the harvested rows in the proud field climb over the rise,

lie fallow in strange beauty, and replenished by resting,

grow another crop,

if growth in the mutant swamp is neon green, unfamiliar, and the

new plants settle and find their place,

if what’s sacred to me has no face or voice or name in a holy book

and for you the sacred is the man and the book?

In these small ways, we go on.

Still, jacked-up rainstorms plunge villages into the ocean,

vast swathes of refugees move across barren deserts in search of a livable place,

crimes against children go unchecked though we look in horror,

plastic garbage in the Pacific has grown three times the size of France,

and I sit before you, grateful for the rest of you, exposed in our despair.

Can anything save us except the old abstractions:

morality, courage, kindness, beauty, and love,

not save us exactly, just make more bearable whatever we have left?