Wild Words

A book I’ve been reading to my 4-year-old lately, in anticipation of her Mimi’s visit from Texas, is The Keeper of Wild Words by Brooke Smith.

The story is about a Mimi, who is a writer, and her granddaughter. They go outside to learn about the wild words in danger of disappearing thanks to Oxford Junior Dictionary‘s decision to remove 100 natural words and replace them with 21st century tech words, primarily.

Brooke Smith isn’t the only writer to mourn the disappearance of these natural words. English poet Malcolm Guite responded with a sonnet, “A Lament for Lost Words” on his blog. My daughter knows that I write poetry too and takes Mimi’s speech very seriously.

When I was reading this book to her before bed the other night, she told/commanded me TO KEEP WRITING.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if you don’t, the wild words will disappear.”

It took me a minute to register what she was saying. “Do you mean if I’m not writing the words in a poem, you think they will be gone forever?”

“Yes.”

“But what will I do if I’m not writing poems? You know I can’t be writing poems all the time, every day” (unfortunately).

“I’ll save the words for you, Mommy.”

Just like the granddaughter in the story, my daughter has become my “Keeper of Wild Words.”

What a title! At the back of the book, there’s an envelope provided to place the reader’s own wild words. My daughter and I have decided wild words could also be words she’s learning from other books that aren’t used much anymore.

Enter Beatrix Potter. Having never read them myself as a child, I’ve delighted in discovering this world with my daughter. Potter wrote these books in the early 1900s and you can tell. My daughter and I have learned “soporific” and “perambulator” and we try to say them in phrases throughout the day so that we remember their meaning. I knew it was working when she exclaimed at dinnertime: “This meal is so satisfying I think it will have a soporific effect.” (Sometimes she sounds more like a 70-year-old.)

Notice how you can get the definition of “soporific” by context.

Hiking amongst Herdwick sheep, the kind that Potter raised and bred, in the Lake District in 2019.

But it’s not only the language that feels strangely fresh. It’s the entire world Beatrix Potter has created where there is real danger and she’s not afraid to name it. Peter Rabbit grows up without a dad because of an “accident” in Mr. and Mrs. McGregor’s garden (see pic below). Does my four-year-old have questions about this? Yes. Does she like Mr. McGregor? No. Does she get scared when she sees him on the page or when I read his lines in a deeper voice? Sometimes (so I don’t do that anymore, and we move through the pages featuring him more quickly).

In teaching our daughter, my husband and I don’t dwell on tragedy, but we name it and move on when appropriate. She is learning about life and, well, loss and death are part of that. I had a lovely visit with a friend the other day who just had a mastectomy. With my friend’s permission, my daughter had the chance to ask her her burning questions about it. My husband has a brain injury from multiple concussions and works as a prison chaplain and so my daughter knows that some people have a tougher time, that life isn’t fair. Some people don’t have homes or families; some people don’t stay married; some people would make great parents but don’t have any kids; some people die far too soon.

Do any other children’s books come to mind that don’t avoid or sugarcoat reality but present it in age-appropriate ways? I’d love to know as I think this is lacking in many children’s books.

Me and my keeper of wild words.

Speaking of wild words, I have my own growing list. On and off since 2020, I’ve participated in CV2 (Contemporary Verse 2)’s annual 2-day poem contest. You are given 10 words and have 48 hours to write a poem using all of them. The contest, as well as their 3-word mini practice contests leading up to the big one, has introduced me to some amazing vocabulary:

• nubivagant
• wrest
• insomnolent
• lacuna
• broadside
• peristeronic
• ensorcelled
• pith
• scrubby
• putative

Fun fact: my poem “POP!” published in talking about strawberries all of the time, was a result of a CV2 mini contest using “effervescent,” “barometric,” and “chesterfield.”

Their upcoming 2-day poem contest is this April 19-21 and I can’t wait! Granted, I’m looking after my four-year-old and twin babies on one of the days but inspiration can come amidst chaos, right? Right?

Lover

Most of the time when I go down internet rabbit holes once the kids are in bed, it’s a waste of time. (And yet I keep doing it…) But some evenings I’ll come across a nugget that makes all those clicks and YouTube videos worth it. 

Such was the case the other night. I ended up listening to Jack Antonoff describe the moment he saw his bride Margaret Qualley on their wedding day.

It was the first time I was just frozen and it felt like 30 years of cynicism was exiting my body.

Jack antonoff

Why has this not gone viral? This is such an authentic, romantic, and non-cliché description that I’m still thinking about it days later.

“Authentic” seems like an attribute that will be even more rare and cherished as AI crops up.

A professor friend shared a slide on social media that she uses in her university classes to prompt discussion about the ethical use of AI: How would you feel if your lover used ChatGPT to write their wedding vows? And what’s the difference between this and giving your lover a Hallmark card?

Reading the poem I wrote for him. Photo by Patchwork Media.

Speaking of lovers (since Valentine’s Day is around the corner), I wanted to share this piece by one of my favourite contemporary poets who is also the current poet laureate of the United States, Ada Límon.

“Lover” by Ada Límon

Easy light storms in through the window, soft
            edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s 

            nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone 
to pick with whomever is in charge. All year, 

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
            Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

            in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
            lover, come back to the five and dime. I could 

            squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
            I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

            of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
            Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned 

            for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

She says this about the poem on poets.org:

Like many of us, I’ve missed a sense of abandon, of recklessness, of easy laughter that the world sometimes offered. During the last twenty months of the pandemic the joys have become quieter, smaller, sometimes nonexistent, a squirrel’s nest in a tree. But still, I have hope that the world will come back. Maybe a little differently, but maybe that tenuousness will make everything a bit shinier. That’s where this poem came from. That, and of course the word lover, which I adore.

ADa Límon

Indeed, what a word….lover. Like Taylor Swift talks about in this video on writing her hit song “Lover” (incidentally produced with Jack Antonoff), I also don’t use “lover” in everyday speech. I never refer to my husband this way. Except in a poem. I happened to be reading Límon’s poem when I was editing my poetry chapbook and her love for “lover” made me change the second last line of “Sunflowers in the Van Gogh Museum.” It used to say: “My love tells me stop / reading museum words.” I changed it to “My lover tells me stop / reading museum words.” Sounds better, doesn’t it?

It’s been almost nine years since I married my lover. I remember thinking it then and I still think it now, “I don’t really know what love is” or perhaps more accurately, “I’m not really sure I know how to love well.”

Granville Island crowdsourcing.

I do know that love is specific. It’s in the “godlike details” as I say in my video poem. Details are what makes a poem or story work. I think a relationship too. I joke (but am also serious) that one of the most romantic things my husband has ever done was strain all the decorative rocks out of this glass bowl, unprompted, when he was cleaning the bathroom where it used to live. 

Looks like this could use another clean! (hint hint: are you reading this, lover?)

I came into the kitchen where the rocks were drying on a tea towel on the kitchen table, evenly spread out like he was preparing cookies on a baking sheet, and I was amazed. Pretty sure I looked at him like this: 

Photo by Meghan Hemstra Photography.

If I could go back in time and tell my younger self this story on her wedding day, what would she have thought? From ice skating on Grouse Mountain and sipping hot chocolate to cleaning the dust off aquarium rocks…is this love’s evolution? As a poet, I assumed words would be enough (don’t get me wrong, I DO love giving and receiving them), but as I’ve grown older and the demands of being a mom to three young kids has increased, I’ve come to appreciate acts of love more than I ever anticipated. My lover cooks, cleans, picks up the groceries, changes poopy diapers, fills the van with gas, makes me a latte every morning, even takes the kids out for an hour so I can write this post and enjoy some rare quiet. 

We joke (or justify our poor decision making) that in this demanding stage of life, we are allowed to waste away our evenings on the internet because we are so exhausted by day’s end and we crave something mindless. “I can’t wait to waste my life away with you,” as bülow sings.

Sometimes even just sitting beside each other on the couch as we go down our separate rabbit trails (and share the nuggets) is enough.

Happy Valentine’s Day, readers!

The Necessity of Seeing and Being Seen

If you enjoy people watching, birdwatching, or perhaps I should just say “creature watching” (who doesn’t?), you’ll enjoy David Zeiroth‘s recent poetry collection watching for life (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Perched on a balcony, Zeiroth observes the comings and goings of his apartment building’s back lane in North Vancouver. “Perched” is apt given the speaker’s bird’s-eye view and the number of birds that appear in his poems: crows, seagulls, pigeons, as well as other creatures such as dogs, rats, and of course, humans.

I picture a lane like this, whatever North Van’s equivalent would be. There is a poem comparing his lane to a Parisian street so this photo reference isn’t entirely random.

The poems in this collection demonstrate a faithfulness to place, to all the possibilities on and around a specific stretch of pavement. They remind me of Monet returning again and again to paint haystacks or the Rouen Cathedral in all seasons and all types of light.

Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series in Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

I imagined Zeiroth’s poems as written during the Covid lockdown as an experiment on how much one can “travel” by guessing at and inhabiting strangers’ lives through careful observation. But then none of the poems reference a pandemic, and that doesn’t make sense because the speaker could still walk the lane like his subjects below. Interestingly, he doesn’t. He stays in his “control room” or his “eyrie” (another bird word that I had to look up since I thought it was a variant spelling of “eerie”). “Eerie” works too though since there is something disconcerting about a person who watches but is never watched.

The title watching for life comes from the same poem where “eyrie” is used. A young couple exchanges a kiss before they walk into North Shore Oncology. Zeiroth writes that they have “no thought / about their public display (or / semi-public since only I see them / here in my eyrie watching for life)”.

Balcony watchers in Venice, 2017.

This “watching for life” phrase has a double meaning: the poet is watching for signs of life, perhaps in a dead or stalled time after losing loved ones (a wife, a brother). “I see her love of flowers everywhere” he writes in one poem. And he is also watching or noticing to save his life as death is “an appointment waiting”. Perhaps this watching and writing is akin to resistance: resistance against loneliness, resistance against apathy, resistance against navel-gazing and self-pity. The speaker is curious and caring towards strangers, even though he declares in the first poem that they “mean nothing to me”. I don’t quite buy that.

He writes: “All I can say / it’s better to take notice: the way smokers dispose / of their butts, how the terrier / pulls the master, the honking / at crosswalks, a shout, so sudden / the erasure of the unseen day.”

Honking and crosswalks at a busy Paris intersection.

The speaker is aware of the necessity of being seen: “what’s needed is the sun of another mind / a glance that doesn’t immediately turn away / but stays an extra second to acknowledge / being seen is important in breaking out of / the fortress bubble of one’s self”.

And yet he consistently laments not breaking out, not entering the scene, not making himself known. “What would my yelling do / except stall his steps briefly?” he muses. “I could say hey, you down there, look up! (they never do)”, which could imply that he has tried yelling or just that people never look up. As a reader, I wanted him to enter that lane, to become part of the story. In one poem, he spots a large grey boulder in the lane and “wish[es] I had rushed down to taste / the earthy essence of the mineral thing / before the mystery left us / with nothing but ourselves again”.

So the question became as I was reading, “Will there be movement in the speaker, whether exterior or interior?”

Fortunately there is. It’s subtle, but near the end of the collection [spoiler alert], he does yell down a phrase at a man whose face is “made ugly by male anger”: “Look up and let it rain in your eye.” And in another poem titled “Anyone down there wanna come up?”, he beseeches someone, anyone, to keep him company in his quiet watching, followed by a poem where he dreams of having “a hundred eyes look down / and spot me on my balcony!”

Look up!

Alas, Zeiroth is wrought with the tension between hiding and being seen. I sensed he was searching the passing faces for ones like his own, “those who have written in the book of grief”. Fear and loneliness are mentioned many times throughout the book, but by the end, the grief lessens. “Suddenly the heart eases, I don’t know why” Zeiroth writes, “for whatever gnawed / gnaws no more.”

I think some inner healing transpires from his outward focus on strangers. The idea that knowing others helps you know yourself, or, as Zeiroth eloquently offers, “so we find / our centres lodged in other people / who have no knowledge / of our state.”

This phenomenon occurred in me as I was reading the poems. I am currently on maternity leave caring for newborn twins and a three-year-old and didn’t expect to find resonance with one of the characters “hard-pressed by offspring / yet anticipating their silence in bed at last / free to enter the night world / of her own making, without delay”. Or the mother who “seeks not for the pennies / she once found but for the thought she had / on the day of his birth, a sunny day / when all the air was light / and she basked in wishes from so many”.

My recent offpsring. Photo by Patchwork Media.

That’s a huge strength of the collection: although the speaker never changes (a man living alone in his twilight years), one could argue he does enter the lane by inhabiting and imagining others’ stories. Zeiroth writes with empathy and ease about smokers and striders, old faces and new mothers to name a few.

The poems’ titles echo this ease. They are all the first lines so that each title is the start of the poem and runs into the first stanza, offering a quick, casual, and scrawled journal-like effect that belies its careful craft. The poems contain a number of internal and slant rhymes (e.g. “salt grime after someone close has died”), and they also give us fresh images such as “civic crucifixes” for telephone poles and a crow who “flips his black judge’s robes”.

For anyone who thinks they need to travel far to have interesting material to write about, this book proves otherwise. We often miss what’s right in front of us. What poems are waiting to be written from the living room window I stare out while breastfeeding or from the top of my street I chug up while pushing the double stroller? What signs of life can I watch for?

Someone added this rickety old bench to the top of my street and it’s perfect.

As Zeiroth concludes, “ordinary is so vast it’s enough / or should be”. Do I live like this is true, especially now in the midst of endless diaper changes, laundry loads, night feeds, and bedtime routines?

On Selling my Last Chapbook, Non-Parenting Books, and Changing the World

I sold my last chapbook yesterday, about a year since it was released into the world. It got me thinking how ephemeral this type of publication is. As part of a limited edition print run as per all Alfred Gustav chapbooks, I knew this day would come. Someone said to me, “But that’s what makes chapbooks special and one-of-a-kind!” Here today, gone tomorrow. The words offered a smidgen of comfort, though I still feel a bit sad (despite the good hands the book went into!)

I love thinking of where this little book travelled to, such as my friend’s condo in Toronto.

No chance of doing readings with copies for sale; no future poet-friends I could meet and do a book exchange with; no opportunity for ongoing purchases.

I picked up my last two copies from my bookshelf that I’m saving for myself and husband, and the other for our 3-year-old daughter Madeleine. I don’t even have copies for the twins on their way, a phrase I could never have imagined myself writing when drafting the Afterword a few years ago. Nor did I imagine my bio would already be out of date, having moved from Vancouver to Coquitlam last fall. My husband began a drawing of Paris from the European vacation that inspired the poems in our old, bigger rental and finished it in our new, smaller one where it now hangs. You read that right. Our family is almost doubling and we reluctantly downsized because, well, money and, at the time, we had no idea what was coming. Life holds surprises in many forms. As Madeleine likes to say, “We never know.”

Drawing of Paris by Adam Back, 2023.

Can I live with the mystery inherent in her statement as well as she can? What do I make of the recent dream where a voice says, “You can’t have a remote control for your life”? 

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, David Bowie sings. Fall to winter, winter to spring, spring to summer. My daughter refused to walk in snow for her first years and this past winter, built a snowman. Now she goes on hikes to find purple flowers.

View of our Coquitlam street with Port Moody high rises in the distance.

Devils Lake in Mission.

Crocuses burst up from the ground, begging to be noticed. New friendships are starting to show too. We get invited to people’s houses in our city and our kids play together. A boy from daycare gives my daughter her first bouquet of flowers, for Valentines, and her face beams.

First flowers.

We find a church that feels like home. We visit the ER more times this season than my whole life, it seems. We watch blood leave our daughter’s arm as we hold her still with all our might and tears leave us too. I have an out-of-body experience watching this scene unfold as if it were happening in a movie to somebody else. I get the same feeling when I practice-push the double stroller. A doctor waves an ultrasound wand around my stomach every other week monitoring for life, growth, breathing, our ever-switching baby A and baby B. Our daughter practices the letter M on every paper she touches and the bumps go on and on like a heartbeat.

No end to her M’s.

Writing is an act of paying attention and I think gratitude works this way too. I have to work at gratitude (which I often do through writing) because there’s a longer list I could complain about, things that are giving me anxiety or fear, but that’s not where I want to dwell.

From The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy.

The wilds of Coquitlam, i.e. our backyard.

Bless the people who give books to new, or newish parents, that don’t have anything to do with parenting such as this one, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy (HarperCollins 2019). At the same time, it has everything to do with parenting.

BBC made a short film about it in 2022. Here’s the trailer that gives you a further sense of its charm and gentleness.

Bless the simple phrase and picture that hold layers of meaning; books you can read in one sitting and can enter in anywhere, not just the beginning.

Bless my daughter’s bedtime song inspired by Hello Humpback where she sings about the sun falling falling falling on everything, landing on the ground, and then rising each day in the sky. Already there’s an arc to her storytelling, there’s contrast, there’s plot. There’s even a hallelujah. 

(even if it’s broken)

Driving back from Vancouver the other day, she told me she figured out what she wants to do when she gets older. “Fix things.” “What kinds of things?” I ask and then give some examples when she doesn’t say anything. “Like buildings? Or things in people’s houses, like Grandpa does? Or perhaps fix broken systems…?” I tentatively offer the latter, not having a clue how to explain it if she were to question further. But she doesn’t. After a pause, she responds, “systems” and then adds, “Because I don’t want to get calluses on my hands like Grandpa.”

What broken systems will she fix? How will she change the world?

Someone on Twitter asked, “Does it bother you to know you aren’t going to change the world?” I replied, “Yes. But if I think of ‘the world’ as my kids’ lives and others close to me, maybe that’s enough, even more than enough.” 

I wasn’t trying to pass the buck or be sentimental. It’s a fine line between realism and cynicism and I don’t want to cross over. I wrote an essay after university about all the practical and wonderful ways my friends and siblings are changing the world and I wondered where I fit in with my words. It’s a bit facile and yet I still have that question. I also have two life-sized question marks flipping in my belly and I am very, very tired.

I often think of the lines, ”I want to change the world. Instead I sleep” from this Ingrid Michaelson song and I appreciate the honesty and humanity in her lyrics.

I’ve often thought I should do a post about sights in Coquitlam or Port Moody that match my architextural vision—I’ve lived here half a year now and my blog has nothing to show for it. While I’ve done some physical exploring, most of it has happened internally. The best way I can explain it is with this:

None of this Belongs to Me

Before we had to move, I had heard of Ellie Sawatzky’s debut poetry collection None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions, 2021) and was intrigued by the title. 

I interpreted it like a confession, and I sensed sadness and loss.

When I visited Toronto in May right after the landlord put “our” house in Vancouver up for sale, that house was almost the only thing on my mind. Language is slippery. It was our house but it was also not ours. It took visiting Toronto to write a poem about what we were losing in Vancouver. The idea of ownership (what actually belongs to me? what can I call mine?) haunted me. Sawatzky’s title returned. None of this belongs to me.

When I heard she was giving a poetry reading at Massy Arts this past September, I was determined to go and finally buy the book from the author herself (provided I liked what I heard, and I did).

In her collection, I found coming-of-age poems, ex-boyfriend poems, Kenora (Ontario) poems where the author grew up, Vancouver poems where the author lives, vacation poems, and work poems.

My favourite section of the book (where the book’s title comes from) are these “work” poems that offer vignettes of the speaker’s role as a nanny looking after a three-year-old girl called “B.”

Take these lines from the poem “Nounou” that also relate to language:

I sit with B in her kitchen, discuss
a Safeway bouquet
of lilies. I say lis. B says

Maman accidentally. 

None of this belongs
to me.

That twinge of sadness and loss is amplified in “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” where Sawatzky writes: “The first girl just wants something to belong to her…”

While the book covers multiple subjects, the connecting thread of “playing a part” was most evident for me. Playing the part of mother, of adult, of being responsible. The joy in reading the book was discovering what “this” in the title refers to. The lines quoted above make it explicit—“B” doesn’t belong to the speaker, but there are many other examples of what doesn’t belong to her throughout the collection. 

Adulthood, with all its revelations, loneliness, and losses, is another one. 

B doesn’t know

she won’t always be a child,
the way I didn’t know I’d be

thrust into this thistle-stitched
ditch of adulthood.

-“Ouroboros”

I love the assonance of those short ‘i’s, echoing the narrowness of a ditch, as well as the spitty awkwardness of those “th” and “ch” consonants that suit the thorny journey to adulthood.

On a road trip at 24 with her parents, Sawatzky writes in “Recalculating”:

In the silence now
we’re all adults and no one knows

what’s best.

And in “What Blue”:

With Grandfather dead,
we are three single women, sisters, girls, absorbing

the mysteries of the world comparing blues.

These are poignant lines, but there is also humour and sass in Sawatzky’s writing, like in “Blessings Upon U and Ur Bullshit” that she dedicates to her neighbour “who threatened / to have my car towed / bc it was parked in front of / ur house…u’ll understand when ur / a mom u said / u’ll understand / when ur a homeowner / but I won’t / I will never be like u”.

Her house doesn’t belong to her either, and how many other renters can relate to the feeling conveyed in the line “i pay her / so she owns me”?

Sleep doesn’t belong to the speaker anymore when she’s at her father’s bedside in a hospital room in the opening poem. Rob Taylor beautifully analyzes “Overnights at the Hospital” in his Tyee article, “Be Brief and Tell Us Everything.”

A self-conscious voice emerges in some of Sawatzky’s poems. A surprising number are self-referential (I began counting how many have “poem” in the poem) and felt they could have been stronger without this (but I am of the school that doesn’t usually like the fourth wall broken). Sawatzky mentions in this interview with Rob Taylor that she likes playing with expectations of poetry and drawing attention to its process, but I found those poems detracted from her otherwise strong theme.

Sawatzky is at her best when the poem isn’t obvious, when it fades into the background and the reader is left with images and sounds that haunt, punch, linger, explode; when she’s working out what does and doesn’t belong to her and subverts readers’ expectations of girlhood and female desire. The reader might assume someone who wants kids or who does want them but can’t have them would pursue work as a nanny. But not so. In “Crystals,” Sawatzky declares, “I tell my mother I never want kids.”

By the end of the collection, I notice a movement from naming and/or lamenting what doesn’t belong to her towards claiming what does belong to her…even the unpleasant parts one doesn’t like to admit.

In “Self-Portrait as Ostrich,” the second-last poem, she sounds the most vulnerable and mature:

I do dream regularly
that I’m gathering eggs

And I thought it was because I used
to look after children

Or because I’ve rewatched
Fly Away Home

so many times and maybe that’s true
but maybe also

I’m finally taking responsibility for me
Anger has a shape too

Ditto shame ditto pride when it unfurls
when I rise

Up off my knees to become
the biggest bird alive

Here is a speaker who accepts she doesn’t have it figured out (“maybe that’s true”) and holds numerous possibilities out in her hand like seed for a bird, not sure which one will take. But the uncertainty doesn’t shrivel, paralyze, or keep her on her knees. Rather, it emboldens her to the extent that she stands up to become “the biggest bird alive.”

Coming out of (and soon approaching another) season of uncertainty, as is the way life ebbs and flows, None of this Belongs to Me felt like a gift at the right time. I am prone to anger too, prone to complaining about life not being fair (and yes, the old adage who said life was fair? always plays in my mind in response), and there is a sisterhood, so to speak, in Sawatzky’s words and in the kind message she wrote in my copy of her book:

Sending care as you settle into your new space. Hope you enjoy the familiar and strange in these poems.

I have been so focussed on our old house, our old city, what we lost and left behind (and there is a season for mourning) but I think it is now time for me to look ahead, not only for myself but for the sake of my child, who very much belongs to me even as she simultaneously does not belong to me. Oh language, oh the paradox of both/and.

The future is as it always was, a quivering
night lit occasionally by lightning. World
without end.

-“Matrilineal”

Running to Not Forget

When I run, I go to Mountain View Cemetery. I love seeing how it changes, how it stays the same when the world around me is so precarious.

When I returned home last Saturday, my toddler announced, “Mommy, when I get bigger and older, I want to run through a cemetery.” I laughed.

Little does she know she’s been here many times as a baby. I wrote a poem about the experience of walking through here with her two years ago as the world was on edge, COVID “sweeping the world / like my father in a game of Risk.”

That military image feels devastatingly apt right now as I run past gravestones and think of Ukraine. All the suffering they have endured and are still enduring. All the lives and homes lost. All the loss. The horrific war crimes the Russian army has committed in Ukraine, particularly against women and children, has shaken me. One of the questions I keep circling back to: “Where does all that hurt go? What does a country like Ukraine do with all that grief/rage/trauma?” I don’t have answers.

I recently read an interview with Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska in Vogue. When asked what can ordinary citizens do to help Ukrainians, she says:

The main thing is not to get used to the war—not to turn it into statistics. Continue going to protests, continue to demand that your governments take action. 

I suppose running and praying through a cemetery is one way I don’t get used to the war. There is death all around me here, including death from war. I notice how young the men are in the numerous memorials throughout the cemetery, many of them younger than me.

But I also run through the cemetery because there are signs of life all around me too: from cherry blossom trees to blooming heather, from freshly cut flowers to surprising gravestone offerings like big, juicy oranges. I need these reminders lately.