It has been challenging to find time to write. And with the times also being challenging, there has been so much to think about and sort through and process- which are all just synonyms for needing to unpack some cranial baggage.
This weekend, I was chatting with my parents and I mentioned working on papers for a class I’m taking and how I didn’t understand how anyone could write papers sticking close to the page minimum when there was just SO MUCH information to share and synsethize.
Dad helpfully mentioned that Abraham Lincoln was a master at writing sparely- the Gettysburg Address was barely a page long and his second inaugural address took only six or seven minutes to share. Maybe I should try to write more like him, Dad said.
OK. Just be more like Abraham Lincoln, I thought.
Then I listened to this poem by Natasha Trethewey. “Miscegenation,” which shares a family history and a national history and contains great emotional depth- all in just 170 words. It’s written as a ghazal, which, I learned, is a form of poetry that originated in Arabia centuries ago. Ghazals generally consist of between five and 15 couplets with a repeated word or phrase at the end of each line and some type of internal rhyming scheme. “Each couplet should be a poem in itself, like a pearl in a necklace,” I read on one site– a description I particularly love.
“Miscegenation” is so moving and masterful. The form so interesting to read. I thought I’d take Dad’s advice, sort of, and summarize my thinking on the past many weeks into a Ghazal (or maybe a ghazal- cuz I probably didn’t follow the form exactly and I’m terrible at rhyming poetry).
Here’s what I came up with. In under 8 billion words.
"October 2020" What we’re learning in this moment is the oxygen we need to breathe is the little things. For instance, last week, the watercolor butterfly wings on the brown leaf was the little thing. My sister says her happiness arrives and resides in vignettes. Amidst the ruthless drums of anxieties her peace is a little thing. So here’s a scene: The walk home while Annie talks to fire hydrants, jumps on crunchy leaves, sings her ABCs, she’s a funny little thing. On one afternoon, my niece weaves clover and dandelions in my hair. Later, I smile finding brambles and bits of weeds, extracting each little thing. Praying mantis, fierce and unfaltering, offers a lesson on self-possession. Both delicate and durable, and at ease in her curiosities, not a little thing. In class, the girls say infinite goodbyes and boys crack inside jokes all on screens, The building of virtual communities, shooting the breeze an amazing little thing. In class, a biracial kid bristles over being asked to choose which side he prefers: Black or white? The question of who he gets to be, his identities, never a little thing. In class, another mixed kid says his spirit animal’s an orca whale because he’s both, Black and white. The body he embodies bigger than society’s insistence he be one little thing. Some days I frown, face flushed, fists throbbing, getting swallowed in outsized rage at news reports, barking dog, bickering daughters, small catastrophes. Every. Little. Thing. Think of this: A year of masks and fires, conversations and confrontations, fury and frustrations All staged on a blue marble floating among the galaxies, an unassuming little thing. This life right now and always has been squeezed into a little thing. A diorama of joy and pain in which I trapeze, tending all the little things.
