by Lo Whittington
Dearly beloved
I am gathering my things
after months of living alone.
This time, it is possible the world has changed again.
Being absent from it, as I was, these months
I make no judgement on how that has gone.
when the dis-ease came, I went off course a
bit
(more than I imagined)
and went somewhere I hadn’t expected.
The last time this happened, ….we gathered together
after the mutilating “radiance of 1,000 suns”
burst over us in Los Alamos,
We barely survived
the consequences of separating
Radium ☢ isotopes
–the nece
ssary |
|
step in the
advance to |
|
destroying
worlds.
That time,
we danced briefly before eating death as our regular meal in bomb shelters.
(And I hold my peace on how that went.)
This time after months,
of living within a small, cellular, galaxy,
sewing
bits of
m c
i
robes to ourselves
we are ready to emerge. ….to have and to hold
All of us
entering into the luminous bending fire
of survival, uneasy with new wisdom,
unchanged in our desire ….from this day forward
to be with one another.
This time I will go somewhere with you,
to sing about what happened here ...until death do us part.
What else is as useful after such events?
Think what they might have sung at Los Alamos.
Lo Whittington is a writer in Iowa City who has maintained a blog for over ten years on living as a transplanted New Yorker in Iowa. She has participated in various poetry readings in Iowa City and has two pieces forthcoming in the annual Midwest Writing Anthology, These Interesting Times: Surviving 2020. Bill Mazza is a visual artist using chance, duration, and accumulation to reinterpret landscape as a relationship of people to their mediated environments, through painting, performance, and community-building collaborations.
Global Poemic 