speaking up

She is in the teachers room eating lunch

When the innocuous talk shifts into racism

Confronting her two days before Halloween

“What’s wrong with blackface?”

She is in her classroom moments after dismissal

When a parent enters to question her lesson content

Teaching the science of climate change

Teaching about Indigenous Peoples Day.

Speaking up like she does is not easy

Holding up against the reactionary push back

Looking for ways to attack and isolate you

Trying to demoralize you into silence.

I am so proud of her determination

To be a teacher who inspires by example

To eradicate every form of ignorance and prejudice

She is a very special person to know.

Having such a daughter close to me

Talking together about the challenges in her life

Sharing in the happiness and optimism of youth

Makes me a very lucky man.

downstream

Some days I feel like we are all being swept downstream

Imbibing pollution in what we eat and drink and breathe

Sickening us in ways we don't fully understand

Captives in our fouled nest our planet earth.

My vision looking down from the bridge at Dunkerhook

Where the Ho-Ho-Kus Brook joins the Saddle River

Watching the mallards that make their home here 

Living a few miles downstream from the sewer treatment. 

Thinking of the filled septic tanker trucks we see arriving 

To flush their collected contents into that facility

Across from the Giant Farmers Market store

Where we go to shop for fresh produce.

When it hasn't rained or has rained a lot

We can smell the sewage there on the bridge

Even after treatment to remove certain pathogens

But today I am focused on the odorless medicine in it.

Those ducks are host to the H1N1 bird flu deadly to us

Ingesting this water laced with Tamiflu antiviral pills

Passed through human urine and bypassed by treatment

Causing the virus to mutate and develop resistance.

Closing the loop back on us everywhere we turn

What we and they consume is what we produce

Pesticides and herbicides and exhaust fumes

PFAs and PCBs and all the chemical alphabet soup.  

Even so I think a technical solution is possible

If only we do away with this political economic system

And turn loose human ingenuity on the problem

To create a sustainable cycle for all life to thrive. 

The tension between what is and what might be

Infiltrates into every conversation about existence 

Forcing its way into consciousness against all resistance 

Compelling intervention to take control of the future. 

her childhood bike ride

Listening to a dear friend tell us personal items

Charming as ever at ninety-eight-and-a-half

Happy to count the half years with her still with us

The way we did when our age held but a single digit.

We brought a pocket talker device with us

Hoping she would like hearing our amplified voices

As I fitted the headphones on her ears

Secretly taking my chance to caress her soft hair.

Turning on the mike brought a beautiful smile

Making my day rosy before I even sat down

To watch and hear her expressions of delight

Holding the things we brought to give her.

Fall colors in red maple and sweet gum leaves

Yellow gingko and white cedar and pine sprigs

Aromatic lavender and sedum flowers

Greenery picked from our yard this morning.

Then we heard from Rosie what it was like years ago

Like the eight months she was immobilized

After a bout with polio paralysis at seven years old

When she read the collected works of Mark Twain.

Cheerfully explaining how she became an atheist

Thanks to that reading thanks to catching polio

And how she learned to ride a bike to get around

But went right past the church on Sunday.

I can almost see her now pushing the pedals

Laughing as she goes by on her way to have fun

Heading to the river down by the dock

Free of illusions about priests and their God.

Sherman Hoffman and Cross Estate October 26, 2019

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