love and light

I'm sending love and light to all of the sweet, innocent kids afflicted with seizures—the scary ones, the kind that hurt, the ones that cause broken noses, bloody tongues, face lacerations, the kind that make them feel as if they're being smothered. I'm sending love and light to the parents of these precious ones who have been cheated by no fault of their own.

I am sending love and light to Hannah, the mother of a little boy named Casey whose seizure I watched on video today and, when it was over, whimpered to his mother, "I don't know why." I wept hearing him breathe, watching his limbs stiffen and tremble and his hands cramp up. I saw my own son in his darling face and wondered if Calvin would utter the same sad words in the wake of seizures, if he could speak.

I am sending love and light to Lisa, whose daughter Emma has been crying for a week since a neurologist advised to reduce her daughters benzodiazepine too quickly.

I'm sending love and light to every mother and father trying their best to navigate the complex and enigmatic world of pediatric epilepsy while sleep deprived, spread too thin, despondent and anxious. I'm sending them strength to challenge and question neurologists. I'm sending courage to trust their guts in the face of doctors who cavalierly pile on medications, downplaying their side effects, aiming for seizure-freedom at nearly any cost, neglecting to consider quality of life.

I'm sending love and light to all the little ones who don't understand what is happening to them, and who have been robbed of a pain-free, care-free childhood.

              

Calvin coming out of a grand mal seizure, 2011

twenty-six: remembering sandy hook

Stepping
into a seaside childhood morning
—only colder—
Wind whipping,
Moist and grey and brisk,
Rudy by my side.

Muddy
gravel underfoot,
Bits of sandy ice. A soggy cigarette butt.
The chapel bell begins to ring.
I stop to listen,
and count.

Twenty-six.
My head hangs low
and sorry,
Straining to hear each faint toll
amid the hiss of traffic
rushing by.

The fields,
A semi-frozen marshland.
My ribs lace up,
Wind whisks away each breath,
I begin to sob into shallow
glass puddles.

A sudden squall
evokes a school of hushing voices.
The tops of watchful trees
Standing tall and firm,
yet swaying
Nonetheless.

Silent forest.
Distant barking dogs.
A murder of crows looks on.
Thwap, thwap, these rubber boots against
Bare calves
Sting.

The skies
are silver, lead and low.
Shivering limbs set free cool droplets
like tears upon my face,
One for each child lost we must remember.
 Twenty-six.

In loving memory of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims. 

photo by Michael Kolster

to the laborers

I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.

―John Steinbeck

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. 

―Upton Sinclair 

On this Labor Day I post in honor of the world's laborers—the poor, the underpaid, the overworked, the struggling, the underaged, the disadvantaged, the enslaved, the minority, the immigrant, the intellectually disabled—who assemble the products, who serve the public, who harvest the crops, who pack the meat, who forge the metals, who sew the clothes, who mine the ores, whose collective voices fought for the rights all of us enjoy, and on whose backs wealthy investors make millions, whether consciously oblivious or willfully blind, to the magnitude of the laborers' toil and the inadequacy of their take.