Knowing Where to Stand

Knowing where to stand isn’t easy.
It’s not just about timing,
like snagging a spot at the curb
for the Christmas parade.
And it only partly depends on talent,
landing at the head of the line
with your foot in the door
and credentials in hand.
Intention has something to do with it.
But even after the best laid plans—
like a bride exactly here
and the groom over there
and a clear easy shot
down the lucky middle—
where to go next isn’t clear.

Knowing where to stand
always requires care:
Keeping in mind tender foliage
when you veer from the path
and feeling your way forward in the dark.
It’s relying on instincts,
removing your shoes
if the ground beneath you is holy
or, if the ground is unsteady,
not stepping at all.
And it’s learning how to discern:
How close can you get
to a stranger or lover or friend
without scaring them away?
How quickly does the water get deep
when you’re wading in?

Standing eye to eye and face to face
is a privilege, and to keep it requires
knowing how to behave
if someone shifts this way or that,
or be willing to move if they say
you’re blocking their sun.
Knowing if they trust you enough
to let you click the shutter.
If your honest answer
will land like a kiss on their lips.
If it’s time to consummate the deal.
Where to stand if you fail.



Displaced

I don’t know where to go.

Where people will go, I’ll go.
North, south, east, west,
if they stagger to the sea,
If they shift to and fro
from the right to the left
like a sparrow flits,
like a swallow flies,
I don’t know where to go.

Where people will go, I’ll go.
If they flee to the desert
half-starved and parched,
if they burrow in holes
in the north in the south,
like a battered reed,
like a smoldering wick,
I don’t know where to go.

Where people will go I’ll go.
If they sail off on ships,
if they mount up on waves,
if they reel and they groan
from the heights to the depths
like drunk men unanchored,
like souls dispossessed
I don’t know where to go.

Where people will go, I’ll go.
if they wait in the rubble
hemmed in and helpless
behind and before,
and they build up the rubble
and the rubble’s reduced
to more and more rubble
I don’t know where to go.



Sleepers

”In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country.” (From “The Trauma of Facing Deportation,” The New Yorker, 4/3/2017)

The resigned child lies still.
Month after month,
she is alive, but barely.
It all begins when life goes off track,
when she finds her own story
no longer coherent,
when the promise of safety is taken away.
It’s one way to cope.

He lies in bed, and bit by bit
slips away from the world,
as if to the depths of the ocean
in a box made of glass.
Careful, he says to himself.
If you speak or move,
you will set up vibrations,
the glass will shatter,
the water rush in,
and you will drown.

She sleeps like Snow White.
He sleeps and around him lingers
an atmosphere of Michelangelo’s Pieta.
It’s difficult to describe what it’s like,
more difficult still to say what’s required,
a kiss or a power like Christ’s resurrection.

Children are always listening
and sometimes make visible
the cracks that appear
in times of great tension:
The father’s helplessness,
the mother’s sorrow.
The father’s shame,
the mother’s weeping.

They say if the immigrant children
cannot recover their sense of belonging,
they will never wake up.

How creative the mind is to find
multiple ways to cope,
sleeping or up walking around,
when all sense of belonging is lost.
It’s difficult to describe what it’s like—
the lack of hope,
the father’s helplessness,
the mother’s sorrow—
more difficult to say what’s required
when your child slips through the cracks
away from the world,
when your story is no longer coherent,
when life as you know it goes off track.