Stopping For Beauty

“When did we forget?  But we were never

Children, never found where they were hiding

And hid with them, never followed

The wasp down into its nest

With a fingertip that still tingles.

We lie in bed at night, thinking about

The future, always the future, always forgetting

That it will be the past, hard and hollow,

Veiled and humming, soon enough.”

                            Mark Jarman “The Children”

And so it goes, soon enough, a week of bloody, bone-crushing injury to us and our democracy.

I finally had enough of the sacrilege, the carnage, the old man having his head bounced off the pavement by the cops for daring to question authority.  Flashback to the knee on the neck, the baton flying, the rubber bullets, the tear gas, the inhumanity.

Then there’s Trump at the church with the book he’s never read full of symbolism he’ll never understand.

The supreme leader of the Confederacy of Idiots, immoral, cowardly bastards, one and all.  (Mattis waits until now to call him out?  Thanks, general, but your courage comes much too late!)

So I had to get out and walk.  I had to photograph some flowers and trees to remind myself there is still beauty in this world.  The president hasn’t looted all the flowers—rest assured, he’s working on it.  The blood has not dried on the asphalt of American cities, but we need the red roses alive to remind ourselves, like the deepest chambers of the heart, that hate must be expelled.

I needed this before I fell more deeply into the abyss.

Here’s to early summer, the flowers and the trees.  Here’s to Beauty, in spite of everything.