Reality

A prose poem first published by Chiron Review and most recently read for John Jay College’s 9/11 remembrance

I am pulled from light and life—from songs that I can barely hear but long to know by heart, and stars that are alive and can speak if I could just understand the language, and trees that whisper of the glory of God if I would but listen, and galaxies that explain mysteries if only I were not too small to learn.

I am pulled from light and life back into reality—the meaninglessness of the passionless explosions of bombs that kill children, of the monotonous exercise of setting a place at the table for one who never really comes home, of the darkness of another day of deferred hope.

But the normalcy of dishes and laundry, the laughing faces of my children, the nudge of the dog wanting to be scratched between her ears—these remind me that this existence, too, is reality.

All of it is—the stars that speak, the bombs that kill, the children that laugh—climaxing, not to any comprehension—but to belief—belief that all will be well despite the ugliness and ache around me.

And I find that I must pass gracefully between the mysteries of the galaxies and the routine of the laundry. And the solidity of one superimposes on the shallowness of the other, so that the killing and the meaninglessness and the darkness all become such a minute part of my universe, that fear and anger or destroyed by joy.

And I hum snatches of that song I can barely hear as I put the plates on the table.