“We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.” –Robert Frost
In Poland, a young woman is having her blood tested for abortion medication. The test comes out positive, and the police escort her to jail.
You are not interested in the news. You believe it does not apply to you, or you are simply grateful that cars still stop at the pedestrian crosswalk.
We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, you say, as if life weren’t a circle with history wheeling around and around, a kind of peripatetic merry-go-round that never lets us say the end.
We were raised on tales of ladders that could be climbed one rung at a time to a better life. Children of immigrants, we needed to believe the sacrifice was worth it.
This is the problem with old age. Fascists should always kill the elders first, the ones who have skin in the game, wrinkled, sagging elephant’s skin with a very long memory…
of the woman who sold hot pretzels with mustard in the basement of Famous and Barr in St. Louis, Missouri in 1970. The woman with a long string of numbers tattooed on the inside of her arm. We loved the pretzels, salty and crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, tangy with mustard, warm in the belly on a winter afternoon. But really, we came for the tattoo, the secret reality behind shopping malls and jingle bells.
I love to dance as much as the next person, perhaps more, but I don’t like to go around in circles unless of course, I’m whirling with the Sufis, holding secrets in my belly while the world becomes a blur.
For there is a sweet center on the inside of Uvalde and waterboarding, and I’m not talking about Jesus either, or insider trading.
The secret is a secret because it can’t be known.
Because we’ve walked on the moon but not the sun.
Because the safety net doesn’t keep us from falling.
Because disaster is the springboard to delight.
I have loved you since before I was born.
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash
