Saturday ~ April 18, 2020

Because the year is new and the great change already underway,
we concede a thousandfold and feel, harder than the land itself,
a complicity for everything we did not see or comprehend: cynicism borne of raw despair,
long-cultivated hatreds, the promise of leaders traveling like cool silence through the dark.
My life is here, in this small room, and like you
I am waiting to know - but there is no time to wait for what has happened.
What does the future ask of me?
those who won't have enough to eat by evening,
those whose disease will now take hold -
and the decades that carry past me once I've died,
generations of children, the suffering that is never solved,
the heat over the earth, its marshes,
its crowded towers, its unbreathable night air.
I would open my hand from the wrist,
step outside, not lose nerve.
Here is the day, still to be lived.
We do not fully know what we do.

(Joanna Klink, b. 1969)