Poetry on Thursday

I have a friend whose mother recently died from coronavirus, so I've been thinking about her and the pandemic a lot. When we talked she said that her mother's death seemed to have an extra layer of sadness because she had an appointment for her first vaccine shot on February 18th. That frame of mind is why I chose this poem for today. Hope is a very good thing and something we all need to work to maintain, but it's equally important to acknowledge the grief, sadness. and loss and remember those who are gone.

When people say, "we have made it through worse before"

by Clint Smith

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

You can read more about the author here.
Clint Smith is much more than a poet; you can view his TED talks here.

I wish you mindfulness, peace, good health, and the power of poetry as this week winds down.