Celebrate!

An Essay

Think of your body as a convention of cells
drawn out of each other
Each with its life, its struggles and needs,
shuffling through twisting strands of functions and excretions,
honey to their brother and sister cells,
in tumbling exchange of molecular delight.
All for one and all for good for you.

And which of those cells expiring,
giving its all to its absorptive neighbors
or flaking off your shoulder, floating down
through leather and grasses
to feed protozoaic deconstruction engineers
who break it down and distribute its chemical prizes,
Which cell reaching its end made an end of you?
Not one yet if you still listen.

Take heart then and hope against hope
that some ancient wisdom born
in some protein laden soup
stirred by the cooling mother’s hand
when a cell formed around a spiraling idea
then burst with joy in two and then again and again
till so many cells pressed against each other
they found solace and mutual exchange
and agreed the next split would not be so full
and two would live as one,
then four and again and again,
till the math was done and you breathed your first
but surely not your last
To you, fair sir, fair lady: Good health.

I wrote this poem for not particularly good reason except to confound expectations. I’d been writing some way too dead serious pieces–heartfelt stuff, don’t get me wrong, and if read rightly, heart rending—but way too long in the mouth. Of course those were serious times with serious things going on, an apparent mad man in the White House and the little crowd around him that seemed to be the ones who drove him to that madness were in the process of not declaring but making war on the wrong folks. We’d already stepped into the nexus of the problem in Afghanistan. To turn tail and high our way over to Iraq lacked logic in a thousand ways, from the fact that the people who were attacking us were remnants of the people we had supplied with weapons to use against the Russian invaders in the 1980’s to the fact that Saddam was not an emminent threat to the easily foreseen fate if the either of the missions to Afghanistan or Iraq were under-manned or under-financed. Which, of course, is what we promptly proceeded to do. What leadership. Rather than fix one country, we screwed up two. Or three.

There were very harsh things going on. I’ll put up a poem that demands that the perpetrators of the first beheadings beg forgiveness for their sin. My first college English teacher told me once somewhere in the early ’70’s that she regretted the loss of a sense of sin. It had given weight and meaning to so much, I guess she meant. I wondered what she meant. Even though I was doing an atheistic shuffle in the back of my head at the time, I knew intuitively that sin was still possible, we didn’t need a divine intermediary to tell us when we’ve sinned against one another or our selves. So this poem appeals to that sense of sin.

If any of this has any attraction for you, you can find more poetry at There’s More to Blues than Meets the Eye. I’ve run out of books, though, so don’t order them. I’d have to put them together and who’s got that kind of time these days? Well, if you insist, I suppose I would.

—stan

A note on reading: Aloud, I say, or not at all! And put some juice into it! What would you be saving your breath for, anyway? Your birthday is coming? You got how many candles?