If I Could Send the Sun

Sprawling from my mouth

The days feel heavy but it might just be the heat of summer, dragging at my heels. It is not my favorite season. I tend to have a flavor opposite of the typical winter-based seasonal affective disorder; where most people I know suffer during the dark days of winter, my mood drops as the sun gains strength. It sounds very melodramatic and I suppose it is. I make the best of it.

Writing last night and this morning and it is all about my broken heart, and wondering if yours feels breaking or broken too. It is easy to be angry, or indignant, in that first flush of feeling wronged, but in quiet moments after that original surge of adrenalin there is only heartbreak. Wishing things were different. For the way we've lived our lives, for how we treat one another and seem hellbent on continuing to treat each other. Pointing fingers and calling each other names.

The difficulty is in not getting swept up in it all. I like to tell myself that I love too much, but how is that even possible? Isn't love, relentless, vigorous, unwavering love, the point?

So I am going to pull this one back from the brink and end with this beautiful poem from my friend Todd Davis, from his book In the Kingdom of the Ditch. Its dedication is to another writer whose perspective would be most welcome now.

A Prayer for My Sons, after a Line of Reported Conversation by the Poet William Blake to a Child Seated Next to Him at a Dinner Party

If I could send the sun

sprawling from my mouth,

if each night the moon might drop

-

from my eyes onto your head,

if I could reach up and take a star

whose light has traveled toward you

-

for thousands of years and place it

under the bed where you sleep,

I would do all these things. But

-

being a man who has seen

no angels and who at times doubts

what he's been told in church,

-

I'll simply ask what the Poet asked—

that God would make this world

as beautiful to you as it has been to me.

-

For Brian Doyle

Please be well, please be kind, especially to yourself.