Praise the darkened rooms.
Praise the empty-handed father
sitting in the early morning dark.
Praise the unfilled wished for love
from open-handed father,
and the clenched fist of the mother.
When your sternum is tender
with sadness, whether from today’s
death count or the emptiness of 1975,
place your own cupped hands
before your heart. Praise sadness.
Praise the ability to breathe,
praise the breaths you wished to take
to fill the lungs of your second father.
Praise his death,
and his humble willingness
to stop breathing. Praise
his completed Income Tax forms,
neatly sealed in an envelope
sitting ready on the piano.
Praise this strange year
when the deadline is extended
out to July.
Praise not knowing what
summer will bring, and not knowing
how, and how many of us,
will arrive.
Praise the notion you’ve had
of the Great Flood, the one you don’t believe in,
that was a way to curb the bad,
to purge the overflow. You’re not
the only one to ponder at the drowning,
hundreds each day now,
of the ones in hospital beds or
not in beds,
the ones who are humbled,
and those who were certain
they weren’t meant to be drowned.
Praise the ancient test of evil,
the crushing beneath a board and stones,
the present punishment of lungs
imposed on all, whether or not
they be witches.
Praise the bearing witness to lives
crushed or those who will crush
your own, to the purging of the
good and pure, the breath, the heart.
Praise your own cupped,
good, empty hands before you.
fresh out of my mind 