I don’t deserve the soft
mattress I sprawl across each morning.
Letting my 40-year joints stitch themselves back together.
But most nights,
it’s what I’ve said wrong that keeps me awake.
In fact, I would say
none of us who have
soft mattresses deserve them.
We didn’t earn them.
Just luck.
We are born lucky.
A devoted family, a country not
torn to shreds by war.
Food in the kitchen;
no bloated bellies except when
we eat too much junk.
So why does sorrow still
creep in?
I find the wrong in small, small things,
and they sour like curd left to set too
long in the heat.
They blister my nerves.
I become a pulsing mass,
pushing past the ammoomma
parked sideways in the cereal aisle.
Why didn’t I give her any grace?
Why am I so weary all the time?
I doomscroll on my phone;
cracked tempered glass like
everything else I don’t take care of.
Doomscroll, what a word.
Cakes. Vacations. Drunk weddings.
A mother holding her child.
But the child wears black plastic
for a diaper.
I wonder why I am so weary, weary.
The child is all bones and angles, and the face—
that same look the Somali children had in the ads
on TV when I was small.
And there is nothing more in that moment
that I want than to trade places
or scream or sledgehammer a car or
anything, but not nothing. I want to hold this mother.
Her child will soon die.
And who will comfort her in
Gaza, where
soft mattresses and full bellies write,
“But October 7th, what about that?”
“She doesn’t look as starved as her kid?”
“Even so, come, Lord Jesus!”
Even so,
mercy is a funny thing.
We want it for ourselves but not others.
I wish my chest didn’t feel like it can no longer
cage my heart.
Growing, stretching, pulling until it bursts,
and I vanish into the rains that
flow down the mountains.
But then I blink:
back in my living room.
My daughter dances,
her belly full.
Her wobbly arabesque cuts
through the thickness in my throat.
I don’t deserve this.
Even so.
I tell her it’s time for bed.
A Note
I’ve been having a love/hate relationship with social media. Mostly hate.
Yet I still find myself checking each app; the colonization of algorithms digging deeper in my brain.
Yesterday, I saw the photo that I believe will be looked at 50 years from now, and people will ask, “Why didn’t anyone do anything?”
And while there are many out there on the front lines doing the right things and the hard things, just as many, if not more, of us are just too comfortable.
Myself included.
Unfortunately, I made the universal mistake of checking the comments on the photo.
The absolute least I can do as a human being right now is not leave comments whatabouting a woman whose child is near death. Or questioning her appearance. Or praying for the end of the world.
When I saw the photo, I immediately thought of La Pietà.
A lamentation of an innocent.
A mother mourning alone.
I don’t have any answers or advice other than to say this:
There is no justification for starving and bombing children.
For Further Reading
The Guardian
CNN
Unicef
International Rescue Committee
World Food Programme
An American in Kerala 