New Year's Eve Morning: "Leaving the House that Held the Asylum Seekers"

 I have never been a stay up until midnight kind of gal.  I want to be.  I like the idea of dancing until the wee, small hours of the morning, but I have also never been a dancing kind of gal.  There are years that I want to stay awake to make sure they leave, but I do realize that time is an artificial construct in so many ways.

The Omicron variant reminds us of this essential life lesson, along with others, like a society can only be as healthy as its least healthy members, which is true of health in terms of disease, in terms of stratification, in terms of violence, on and on I could go.

I started this New Year's Eve morning by reading this article in The Atlantic, a piece by a neuroscientist who seems fit and healthy only to discover that he has a cancerous mass too close to his heart to operate.  It's a sobering realization that we may not have as much time here as we think.

In the past, I might have made lists and thought about goals and plans, but I wrote a post yesterday that explains why I'm not doing that this year.  It's hard to break away from that pull, though, isn't it?  I've traditionally spent the time around the turning of the year thinking about what I did right in the past year, what I did wrong, what I want more of, what I want less of.

This year, let me focus on the what I want more of that I can do.  I want to get back to writing more poetry.  While I would like more publications, I am aghast at the submission fees that seem fairly regular now, but I would like to keep submitting here and there, especially to outlets that have been important to me.

My happiest publication this year was being included in the Syracuse Cultural Workers Women Artists Datebook, which is sold out right now.  Two years ago, they accepted a poem of mine, and the fact that they accepted another one made the whole process seem less like a fluke.  

This poem seems perfect for this hinge moment as we move from 2021 to 2022, so let me repost it here.  Once that poem was called "Exercising Freedom."  Along the way, I changed it to "Leaving the House that Held the Asylum Seekers"; I wrote about its origins in this blog post.   Many thanks to Dave Bonta and Luisa Igloria for their inspirations along the way to this poem's 2021 publication:

Leaving the House that Hid the Asylum Seekers

Once again, you find yourself
on the old revolutionary road
with the houses that once hid
the asylum seekers.

The long road stretches
before you, overgrown
with brambles and struggling seedlings.
You see the fires
ahead, burning cities
or perhaps the lights
of fellow travelers.
Smoke hides the mountains.

The road is lined
with the suitcases of immigrants
who abandoned all the essentials
they once lugged to a new country.

You have kept your treasures
sewn into your hemlines, heirloom
seeds and the small computer chip
that holds your freedom papers.
Your grandmother’s gold hoops dance
in your earlobes and twinkle
around your fingers.

You hear the voices of the ancestors,
colored with both reason and panic.
Go faster, they urge.
You are needed up ahead.