Close, Closer a quarantine love poem breathe me into a heat that flares air tightening between us i burn within your eyes myself aflame & wondrous speak my name over & over swirling vibrations around us —antidote to isolation i have loved you [inside of time] ) outside of being ( this moment is a trench i am the sea encompass galaxies of night you are moonrise & every gleaming shadow © Lana Hechtman Ayers
Lessons from Lockdown None of us can truly know the heart of the innocent man waiting on death row, though living in this pandemic makes us feel closer to believing we fathom some great injustice. That death is the only promise life ever made, is made more visible now by this invisible virus soaring in and out on breath. Taking stock, taking inventory however you say it (and not just of consumables like toilet paper and beans) arrives eventually, for all of us, days or weeks into lockdown. Whether we’ve been furloughed (or just plain let go) from our jobs, or have taken to working from home, we come to that urgent question honestly— what matters most in this moment? Contemplating impermanence, cherished clichés come first— love and family and peace. Shelter, and safety and sustenance. Friends and all our faculties— sight and breath and movement most of all, while touch evades those of us fully alone. Home is the sky that is always beautiful, and the tree that leans a little, the chickadees coming to the feeder outside the kitchen window. The low moon swooning and disappearing into the night. Heightened awareness of sweetness. Beloved voices arriving on the various devices. Giving and grace become commonplace— singing, composing, planting herbs, dancing at the curb, dropping off goodies for the elderly couple up the street. We can keep this all going, the simple goodnesses, the heightened senses, even without threat of virus, without sacrifice. All that is necessary— a shift in attitude from being among the condemned— to a gratitude for what is, for the absurdity of uncertainty’s boundless lessons and blessings.
A decade ago on this date, my brother died of a 9-11-related illness. This poem is from a collection about my brother, called The Dead Boy Sings in Heaven. The title comes from all my memories having been altered by knowing how young he'd die, so that even in my childhood memories, I began thinking of my brother as the dead boy. He's in my heart always, but especially now, since he was a first responder. The Dead Boy Cruises for my older brother Alan This may be the happiest moment of my life. I never get to tag along with my brother at nighttime. I’m in the backseat of the dead boy’s hilarious friend Vinnie’s red AMC Pacer, squeezed into the middle hump by his friends Richard (the smart one) and Danny (the cute one). My brother rides shotgun. The windows rolled down, the stars clear, the radio throngs “The Night Chicago Died” all the way up Rockaway Boulevard. Everyone is quiet. All there is is the cruise, and the breeze, and song after song, that make my heart beat likes it’s in my throat. As if to signal a turn, the dead boy extends his arm out the open window. My brother’s hand becomes a sail.
Mother’s Day Gift in the Pandemic As the young man comes closer than three feet to hand me a complementary Mother's Day gift bag, You may be killing me is what I think but do not say, feeling the heat of fury rise in my throat. I am trying to keep my mouth shut, hold my breath, my cotton mask no match for his youth and eagerness to provide cheerful customer service. He has on a mask, but somehow I can tell he's smiling— happy eyes. He’s high school age, maybe a bit older, wants to chat. Says he's going to go for lots of hikes. Never has he appreciated the sun so much since coronavirus, all this being trapped indoors. He seems so fervent and strong and maybe will have a whole life ahead of him. I hope so. Mine may be over soon now that his breath has come within the death radius. He glows with health. I have lived longer than I ever believed I would, an angsty teen thinking maybe I'd make it to 21. But the years passed with me still breathing. I see now even in the worst of times—with my grandmother dying, my violent husband trying to kill me, my father dying, my separation, divorce, my best friend dying, my brother dying— all of it was a gift I had little idea how to unwrap, how to make use of. Now as each day is a promise not made, I cherish the sweetness of this boy's optimism, my little puff of anger gone. I have never been a mother to any but four-legged creatures. Suddenly I have this lethal urge to hug this young man— Coronavirus be damned— tell him he is wonderful and loved and the world is better for his presence in it. I do neither. I don't know him. But I do wish him well and thank him for his heroism in this time. I hope the world will be the kind of mother he needs most. As for me, today is as good a last day on earth as any. Though I'd rather rain than this balmy sun. I've had a mere five decades to practice my humanity, still very much a work in progress. No one ever gets it completely right my Buddhist coach assures me. Last week she came close to being in a fatal auto accident. The sun was not so blameless then, blinding her as she came around a curve. Who would have thought us as fragile as we are against light and breath? Today I will pet my dogs and cats and hug my husband. Drink tea. Eat a ginger cookie or two. It will be enough. More than.
Pandemic Wonder for Andy None of us is immune to death, we humans born with an expiration guarantee. This was always the deal. So why does death feel more real than ever before? There’s no cure or vaccine for the Corvid 19 yet, sure and there may never be. Perhaps it will rage through all humanity until only the fittest remain. How many lives will be claimed when this pandemic is finally history? That, and for how long this enforced isolation will continue are a fatal mystery. But you and I are blessed that while living through such stressful times, we are one another’s shelter in place, each other’s compassionate grace. And the days, however brief they may be, grow sweeter not in spite of, but because of coronavirus’ looming noose. We live so much closer now— as we should have done all along, a gift granted by uncertainty— this death threat that heightens and enlivens our love.
Lana Hechtman Ayers Welcome to the New World Movement in my peripheral vision’s edge makes me look away from the screen out the window in front of my desk. I’m barely in time to catch the tell-tale white head and serrated wide wings of an eagle—American symbol of freedom— before it soars over the roofline out of view. I’ve been staring at my computer for so long the words of the manuscript I’m editing have become ancient hieroglyphics. The sight of the cumulus-filled sky bordered in blue and the rippled pink-tinged beige sand and aqua green seawater below the hillside is such welcome relief. Concentration has been hard to achieve with the startling grief I’m experiencing during this global pandemic— so many losses. To look out at this bright spring day one could be fooled into believing all is well. Calm. People strolling the weekday beach, throwing frisbees or tossing balls to their dogs. Even the stubborn hydrangea outside my porch gate has come into full leaf, buds at the ready. But my heart will not settle into steady rhythm. My breath is shallow. Later, I must make my weekly excursion into town for food—masked, gloved, hatted, scarfed—looking like a nineteenth century immigrant just off the boat from Poland, wearing all of the clothes she owned at once, frightened of the unknown new territory where communication and comfort appeared impossible. I wonder, is this how my grandmother felt, fifteen and alone, disembarked at Ellis Island into the blinding sunlight after weeks seasick in the dark bowels of the ship? Her family had sent her in 1918, decades ahead of the holocaust, not knowing she’d be the only one of her bloodline to make safe passage. And how did my young grandmother manage her loneliness, knowing no one else, everyone and everything around her strange and possibly dangerous? I never once in all the years I knew her, nor in the years since her passing, stopped to think of her bravery. I never thanked her or celebrated her for being the heroine she was. She made my American life possible. If my grandmother could muster all that courage at the tender age of fifteen for a sea journey of weeks, surely, I can manage as much for a simple half-hour trip to the grocery store and back, in my own car, me a native here in my fifth decade of life.
Lana Hechtman Ayers Feast and Fear in the Time of Coronavirus My weekly trip to the grocery store equally may provide sustenance and death. I go knowing that along with the apples and eggs, I may be carting home coronavirus to you, my love, whose immune system is on lockdown for trying to assassinate your body’s entire vascular system. How is it we have come to this, humankind so at odds with nature, even our very own? Scientists say the teeny virus isn’t alive, exactly, just a bit of protein that possesses our same uncanny drive to reproduce, replace, and colonize everything not itself with acres of its progeny. O, the irony of being done in by a beast with our selfsame gluttony. But love, for this moment now, let us set aside these fears and feast on eggs and apples, allow me to nourish you with all the love I can, every sacred mouthful.
Lana Hechtman Ayers Embraces a pandemic poem A few nights ago, in the car on our way to our sheltering place, I was contemplating how all over the virtual world there is fear and poetry, people reporting sadness and success at isolation. All I could think was dark thoughts, how in two weeks or so many of us will be ill, and some gone forever. “Six degrees of separation,” my husband said, as our car careened through ghost town streets, “guarantees we will know someone whose life the virus claims. “And yet,” he continues, “Statistically, only a couple of percent of the billions of people on earth will die, so, it’s truly unlikely that it will be you or me.” I was a Mathematics major in college many decades ago, so my rational mind should have believed him. But the only place my thoughts could traverse was we haven’t written our wills. Our two dogs asleep in the back seat dreamt with bated breaths, perhaps chasing prey, unknowing of the prey all we humans had become. At home, where we’ll remain for untold months to come, we may hurt for healthy groceries, supplements, cleaning supplies, but reading material and entertainment channels flourish. However, no amount of binge watching British police dramas quells my prospering fears. The only way I manage even a few hours of restless sleep is to keep inventing a movie inside my head I hope someday some director will actually film— unreeling across my closed eyelids I watch strangers hugging in restaurants, strangers hugging in offices, in the middle of crowded streets, hugging in grocery stores and at gas stations— this and only this allows me to let go of the day’s dread, this envisioning of humans reaching out for one another, with open arms and hearts, these embraces after pandemic
Breathless Vigil
by Lana Hechtman Ayers
We stand vigil together,
each alone in our own homes.
Some of us stay tuned
to the virtual world,
screen filled with frightening
body counts and new cases.
Some anxiously refreshing
so as not to miss a single update.
And as the walls of the financial
kingdom come crashing down,
others count their stock of stored goods,
toilet paper rolls overflowing closets.
And still others turn to streaming
entertainment, binge watching
every episode in a day.
We are living history,
we are dying history,
moment to moment learning,
perhaps at last,
how every human is entangled
with every other human
all across this blue globe.
Each heart’s warm blood
warms the air in our lungs,
air that we breathe through
speakable, kissable mouths
now kept at special distance.
We scramble to adjust to new
information that takes more
and more away of the way of life
we knew a few short weeks ago.
We seek some meaningful way
to achieve prescribed circumscribed
embrace with those we care for,
from afar, and from near, but now afar.
At last, we truly know
what it means to be connected
to one another by breath,
by wholly life-giving,
death-giving, life-giving breath.
We mourn yesterday when
a trip to the store seemed a chore,
and we mourn all our tomorrows’
cancelled events, the celebrations
that must go unmarked,
the fancy restaurant dinner,
or even a cup of coffee with friends.
Each of us falls in our own way
and only some of us will rise again.
Still, the sun rises,
and spring blossoms,
the sea stirs and stirs, and still,
we humans dare to hope.
3-18-20
Or rather, what I am re-reading:
Travellin’ Shoes by V. M. Burns
in preparation for the 2nd book in the RJ Franklin Mystery Series which is available now!
Motherless Child by V.M. Burns
Love the main character, an honorable police detective in a small Indiana town. Also, love Mama B, his surrogate mother who has a giant heart, cooks enough food for the entire neighborhood, and possesses no filter whatsoever.