Lamentations

Sue and I planned a getaway, but as it turned out we couldn’t go. She has a cold; I have a knee ligament on fire and a migraine. We read Ursula LeGuin’s final poems aloud. I shifted a few thousand photographs off my laptop onto a backup drive. Freshly back from Yosemite, Sue painted scenes of California’s central valley, the setting for her childhood. One of her paintings matches a house and a pig her granddaughter Eliana painted, and I saw the whole thing as a stage set. There is longing: hiraeth, saudade--in Sue’s painting. It’s a lost world, the world of her California childhood. Sadness seeps from its innocence. I can almost hear the lament.

It was a good week to run from the news. Trump attacked Transgender people, threatened to erase their existence. There were more hate murders--two Black people, eleven Jewish people. We can’t keep track of the white nationalist murders any more, they are so frequent. To honor the dead, we say their names. There was a vigil last night. Another vigil will happen in an hour. Another collection of candles, more speeches, more laments. Meanwhile a migration of over 10,000 Central and South American people is moving through Mexico toward the USA to ask for refugee status, and Trump promises to deploy the Army to “teach them a lesson” at the border. Countless (we have no idea how many) children from southern countries are still in prison. One of the young anti-fascists I love--a father, a husband, a friend, writes on Facebook:

“I am hollow and my joy is drained, I feel hopeless in this evil world, where good and innocence is constantly under attack. I don’t know how to be OK. I have nowhere to run.” 

I hear him. I comment on his post, saying the only thing I know for sure is that we must love each other more, love each other fiercely, act on our love in all the ways we can. I say that, and I cannot even hobble over to the synagogue for tonight’s vigil. I write this blip, an homage to a world lamenting its losses.