Introspection From Looking Outward
A mother's musings on the world that she sees around her
Sometimes, I sit.
And I think.
My thoughts are dominated
By things that startle and unsettle me.
How have we arrived here?
*
I watch the outward scenes
Unfolding like a destructive wave
In front of me and think
"Where does this get nurtured?"
Its brashness and rudeness confounds me.
It is the rumble of a catastrophe,
The black belly of hatred
And its insufferable appetite
For the sticky, addictive taste
Of confrontation and division.
I want to stop looking
But it's a car crash
And I am a rubbernecker.
I hold my hands up to my face
And peer through my parted fingers
And think:
"What does all this mean for us?"
*
I try to stop them but my thoughts careen
To fiction I've read and what I know of history.
Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Wilfred Owen.
I don't want to go there.
Visions that unsettle,
That induce fear.
I am a woman but I fear I will become a vessel,
An instrument.
I wear my "Votes for Women" t-shirt
Wondering,
"Will I still have the freedom to do this soon?"
Or will I be subdued?
Or dead?
Atwood knew the black heart
Of control and division
And the grasp of those men who are hypocrits of hate.
She showed us,
A feminist prophet.
Did she believe that it would become true?
*
I don't want to live in a ravaged world
An earth torn up.
When I imagine carnage and ruptured earth,
I veer away towards thoughts
Of a simple life, in the woods
For me and my loved ones,
Its opposite.
We have a mountain view, water from a spring,
And hear the sounds of nature around us.
We dig, using soil and seeds to provide.
Smells of good living pervade our air.
We no longer look outwards
But to the horizon and the sun,
Its rays caressing the valley,
Its universal warmth, not controlled by humans
And their spiteful invective and avaricious raids
From their artificially contrived worlds
Of wealth and luxury.
We live to sustain, to grow, in a harmony
Of our own making.
*
But this is an idyll of my imagination.
It suggests choice in the dream
Of a simple life
Which simply would not be.
I think of the gruesome landscape of "The Road" and
I wonder about roaming what is left of the land
With my boys by my side and a gun between us
Loaded and ready to shoot.
Should I get a gun?
Canning - maybe I should get into canning.
Maybe a windmill? Or buy batteries in bulk?
Could I gut an animal? Will there be animals left?
Again, I shrink from the idea
And yet, it fires me too.
Could we be alright, together?
*
My boys.
My life.
I don't want them to go to war.
I don't want to sit, wondering, hands clenched.
I want to know where they are,
Close to me, not just my heart -
A warmth I can hug, I can hold
And close my eyes and breathe it in.
Is this something I might have to face,
Their being gone?
A premature absence that cuts and smarts
Over ages
But whose impact arrived like a gut punch,
Lessening me in an instant
Leaving my pain to leak through forever shining eyes.
Because when I look out, this is what I see
Hovering, drone-like on a skyline closer than is comfortable:
Loss.
Shouts, shots, screeches, smoke, savagery.
Death piled high.
Death placed low
- in pits.
A dominant power decreeing destruction
For what?
I don't see the pull
That creates this mayhem.
I don't understand the wrenching down
And suppression of other life.
*
I have to pull myself away from here
Into the everyday.
There is peace in the mundane,
The routine.
I resist the squawk of news
Revealed on reels,
The sound bite that sinks
Sharp, yellow teeth into my heart
To maul it for the pleasure
Of tasting my fear.
I hate this feeling.
It threatens to weigh me
And cling to me with its chokehold
And its black hands,
Mounted on my back, making me crooked and hunched.
Today, though, I can shrug it away.
I block the noise and focus on the now.
But it pokes.
It infiltrates my consciousness
With its dirty nail on its pointed, elongated finger:
"Look at this! Look what's happening here!
Come away from the quiet and the calm.
You need to see this and what is being said here."
All of it dark. All of it angry. All of it lies.
*
To defend, to secure, to protect.
I will do it
And I will suffer to do it.
*
The net conclusions that I draw
From trawling through my thoughts
Are two-fold:
I am lucky.
I live a life of freedom.
The confines and restraints I feel are those
Created by a life well lived
And from the maintenance of that existence.
Their binds are loose really.
I am a prisoner of a consumer war;
Non life-threatening.
I greet my morning with gratitude
And a breakfast I do not have to scramble for.
I am lucky.
This is first.
*
Secondly:
I am no vigilante for truth.
I am no warrior.
I am me in all my forms
And I am little.
I hold no power.
I have no status.
I am a woman, a mother, a worker.
Ordinary human living an ordinary life
In extraordinary times.
But know this:
If I have to, I will fight.
I feel it in my gut
And it suffuses me with warmth
And hope
And it leaks from me in tears of determination
And resolve.
It is not my vision of my future
To be a fighter
But it is one which I will accept
Should Danger launch itself headlong at me
Claws out, snarling.
*
It is my hope that I am never tested.
*
But I am ready.
About the Creator
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FPS: The Last Flame Challenge Winners
Welcome to our first Winners Announcement of the year and to the final challenge in the Fall Poetry Series. The Last Flame invited writers to sit with endings, using fire as a central image to consider what remains when something burns out: ash, warmth, memory, silence, or the faint promise of what comes next. The strongest pieces treated endings as gradual rather than sudden, allowing them to flicker, dim, and linger.
By Vocal Curation Team6 days ago in Resources
Comments (14)
Aweosme to read "Love is not only in the light, it deepens in the silence of the night. "Good night" is said in silence most of all."
, This is a powerful writing. I am happy to see that you do have some fight within yourself. Peace is about the fight. That is the only way we gain peace. Once we take our eyes off of peace, we lose the fight. I think that’s why we in the United States are in the place that we are right now. On the verge of losing our democracy, losing our freedoms, losing our love for diversity, losing our love for all peoples no matter what language you speak or what color your skin is, our right to call out those in leadership when they are tossing us a bunk of lies, losing our voice, losing out to money that buys elections and buys social perception. There is always going to be a fight between dark and light, between right and wrong, between oppression and freedom, between greed and love. We became complacent, thinking that this could not happen to us and look. It is starting to happen. In order to have peace, we must fight. Fight will intelligence, fight with love, fight with hugs, fight with good words, fight with positivity, fight with knowledge, fight with light.
I understand your frustration Rachel, and Susan will be on to post in a moment. We had one son who fought in a war and no one wants there child to go to war, and then he came home and was murdered on the streets of Delaware. The other one of my step sons who hadn't spoken to us recently had told us when we told him how excited we were to pay our house off, that we would have to give it to him or put my Grandchildren on the deed and give ourselves lifetime right. Rachel life rarely turns out the way you envision it to be. At our ages we agree with the post under me that we had our share of fighting and now we just want peace.
My thoughts have been going in a similar direction lately. But I'm not ready. Had my share of fighting in the past, and now would only like more and more peace. Is the darkness going to envelop us again, or shall I and mine manage to slip from its grasp is what I've been wondering about...
"I don't see the pull that creates this mayhem." A standout line among many in this poem, Rachel. My son and I have discussed at great length the state of our world and our heartfelt longing for a collective wake-up. I expect to see your poem gain a top story status! 🌹
Extraordinary. I know my wife and I have contemplated much of these same things, and hope the world can come back from the brink before we truly have to test our mettle
Very deep and meaningful, Rachel. I think we all have this morbid sense of what is going on, even if we don't want to see it. "I hold my hands up to my face And peer through my parted fingers" These lines struck a chord because I am like that every night with the news on TV.
Well-wrought! "To defend, to secure, to protect. I will do it And I will suffer to do it." History and personal experience taught me that we must beware making happiness the arbiter of our conscience, or else we will fail to know when, where, and how to protect it. Rather should we make truth the arbiter of conscience, for only then can we hope to avoid the pitfalls into which happiness is lost. We have been many generations conditioned to pursue happiness--trained consumers. As you so eloquently and poetically ask here: does that make us... sitting ducks? We may have the fight in us, but do we have the knowledge?
I feel you, Rachel, through & through. When I was in school, the express purpose was to teach us how to think & discern as much as it was to dispense knowledge. But throughout my life there has been this push toward anti-intellectualism. Many if not most take comfort in dismissing the findings of those who actually think about, study & discern things, preferring simply to react & regurgitate what "knowledge" has been dispensed to them through family, culture & peers. There are powers (currently in this country centered within the GOP, MAGA & around Trump--but not always), who are more than willing to exploit this sensibility (or rather lack of it) for the sake of wealth, power & self-aggrandizement. They count on the fact that there is simply too much "information" out there for most to bother sifting through it. So all they need do is repeat over & over again what they want others to believe & they gladly will--especially if it can be so comfortable as to blame & accuse those who cannot respond or otherwise harm them while submitting to the whims of those who can. Thinking is hard. Discerning is even harder. There is so much we already need to figure out in our daily lives & immediate environs, who has the time or energy to think about more? It's far more comforting to simply sit down, watch FOX News, & react alongside the screaming masses than it is to quietly ponder & discern. Until such time as the negative effects begin to spill into our own lives such that neither they nor their sources can be ignored any longer is it likely to change much. The cacophony is simply too great for most to consider anymore the words of Martin Niemoller, "First they came for...." The wall is simply too thick for them to penetrate until finally they hit close to home. Really close to home--for many it seems even immediate family (as you have so poignantly expressed here) is not close enough.
I agree with Caroline, Rachel, this is a poem of and for our times. Equity and equality seemed to make inroads for a few decades, but this backlash was long in the making and now entrenched with parapets and intersecting fields of fire. I am frightened too, and like you fortunate in my circumstances for now.
Gosh, this is a poem for our times Rachel. You're so right about the squawk of news... it's hard to switch off. I often think about running away to a desert island and shutting myself away because sometimes it all feels a bit much. I hope there are calmer days ahead. I don't think we can all keep going on feeling like this. Wishing you and your family all the best.
Such a powerful piece, Rachel! No doubt you are a fighter, but I hope you are not tested in some of the ways you mention in this piece. But the groaning of this earth is swelling which I confess is no surprise. I felt the ache in the lines “It suggests choice in the dream, Of a simple life, Which simply would not be.” And such rich use of language throughout
Oh, Rachel, this was poignant. In so many ways, these are my thoughts as well. We are leaving in extraordinary times, sped up by technologies on steroids. And it does feel like those who fight for power, control and resources are driving our bus straight to the cliff. Stop the Earth, I want to get off! Great alarmist poem, my friend!
"Leaving my pain to leak through forever shining eyes." Oof, that line hit me so hard. Your poem was so emotional, my friend. I hope writing this was therapeutic in some way for you. Sending you lots of love and hugs ❤️