December 15, 2023

 

We need names that swim, concepts of the flexible spine darting between coral heads, the ones that look like brains and the others, more pale, cauliflower (or bleached broccoli) in salt water, seeming to move with the tide. Some hate the word “wisdom,” others “settler colonialism.” A small child might roam around a garden, putting post-its on flowers: this one is “wise” because it blooms; that one is a “colonizer” because it traveled here in someone’s suitcase. Flexibility, too, has a bad name, the flow (or flower) of migration, as if refugees were tourists, intent on using the resources of an island with so few. Hence, the Syrian child looks at the European sky and marvels in the same way (sameness is the ticket) as a 1/6 rioter regarded the Capitol’s dome. They obeyed the rope lines, even as they ransacked the place. Since same is good, the Syrian child, if he survived passage, disrupted an entire culture, his violence borne out in his regard. That the sky is blue doesn’t escape him, but he needs a home, and that is what you--who are already here-- want only for yourself. The word “pollution” comes to mind, as if the child could dirty a place with his presence. Unless beauty, too, might be pollution, like the pollen that writes yellow verse in the elsewhere Spring. My dog sneezes when she plays.