The End of Days
January, and the pond is frozen outside my office window.
January, and the geese waddle slowly without falling.
It snowed on Martin Luther King Day when I would have gone to the annual breakfast in his name the proceeds of which fund college scholarships for high school students,
and I would have gone to the annual service honoring Dr. King sponsored by the joint clergy association,
but it snowed and snowed. The thermometer never came close to above freezing.
I never
turned on the television.
I have stopped reading the paper above the fold or reading the captions in my email.
Nonetheless, I find out about the various executive orders and other scary things.
It has not yet been a week.
I remind myself the chaos of the new administration is intentional. It’s designed. Like in the Wizard of Oz, don’t look behind the curtain. Turning off the noise helps. But the damage is real and will likely extend beyond my lifetime. So much for optimism.
But the pond is still here. And the geese are still here.
If I were starting my legal career now, I might become an immigration attorney.
What I didn’t like about studying law– It’s all just stuff people make up, no underpinnings. Even though I did not like it, I was pretty good at what I did, I guess.
Maybe this is a good time to remind myself that we are all in this together, and half the country voted for Harris.
Maybe the ceasefire will hold.
Crazy makes me so uncomfortable
My going down rabbit holes is not helpful; though Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were my favorite books when I was seven or eight. There are poems to delight in them. I hold on to poetry. I’m corny in that way.
Yesterday I learned that the poet, Madeline Tiger, died in December. She was fierce. A great teacher. Larry published a few of her poems in Jewish Currents, back in the day. Her best known is probably “The Atheist’s Prayer” which I have taken to reading at my synagogue on Yom Kippur.
G-d’s a metaphor, anyway, more stuff we make up. How else to accept the inexplicable or death, etc., etc. The Christian Right mistakes its metaphors for reality and expect everyone to obey their magical thinking. This cynical new administration takes advantage of that every hour. I’m sure I am not supposed to say any of that.
But I am not offended by friends who are concerned about my eternal soul. I’m touched that they care enough to worry about me. It demonstrates their affection.
Have we lost the capacity to love? I hope not, but I worry.
I don’t think the geese worry
I had intended to be a bit more upbeat, as in don’t worry, the President is a psycho, but everything may turn out all right. But it is not even a week, and I am counting the days until our national sentence ends. It’s unlikely anyone will pardon us.
Now, in ALTE news
Hope to see you at the Puffin Gallery in Teaneck for the closing day of the ALTE show. There will be a reception and a reading by some of the writers whose work, along with that of visual artists, is featured in the show: Esther Cohen, Larry Bush, Sparrow, Zev Shanken and me. Saturday, February 22, 4:30-6:30.
ALTE is OPEN for submissions! The theme for the next issue is “Hot and Cold.” Interpret that as broadly as you like. Go to the ALTEgettingoldtogether.com website to submit or email to altetogether at gmail.com. In addition to poetry and short prose pieces we are always looking for artwork of every kind. Contributors to the issue will now receive a small honorarium. Your Substack subscriptions make this possible.
We are planning an event in NYC in April. More on that to follow.
STAY WARM! STAY STRONG!
At the age of 86, anticipating the arrival of my great-grandson Ezra Adam, in April, making me a Saba Raba, I think of Dorothy's final line, "There's no place like home." Our home is here. The new (and old) Fascism is. here. The geese will fly, the world will go on, the menace of the DTs continue. I will contribute as well, in my own and often less than brilliant way, a poet who knows that his poems will not be known as the world proceeds into its decline.
Yesterday I had an unpleasant medical "procedure," and afterwards I said TGIO, Thank God It's Over. I will undergo more unpleasant procedures, take more probably useless meds, go on grim diets, and do painful exercises, hoping to live four more years so I can say TGIO. True, I won't live long enough, no matter what I do, to join the long struggle beginning in 2028/9 to undo the damage that 's coming, but there's the younger generation and that damn thing with feathers that commands us to keep going.