Of My Heart

“and how it swells, the heart, to bear the cries with which we troubled the startled heavens.”

My friend the late poet C.K. Williams wrote that.

I walked on the Boardwalk in Wildwood already today, like most days, and sat on a bench and watched the streams of walkers and so many of them were Spanish families with small children with raven’s wing black hair and the bright eyes of innocence and delight and they brought a wrench to my heart that lasts even until now.

My shuddering mind’s eye saw these sweet pure kids in cages, alone, stricken, orphans now, small helpless strangers in a strange and threatening land of uniformed jailers whose priorities were distant and finally savage to these marooned and lost little souls. 

My teary mind’s eye saw these very same smiling and happy kids transposed by some dark and evil magic to a bare and threatening courtroom where they were parked like foundering chess pieces in front of a harried and vacant-eyed judge as if they could by some of that same dark and evil magic plead for themselves in a language they know as little about as the justice that was being denied them every minute of their young and now lost lives. 

Oh, yes, Charlie Williams, my dead and mourned poet friend, the heavens – if they exist – must indeed be startled at the inhumanity afoot in this once proud land, and the cries with which fools like me trouble them in our ignorant floundering after hope and righteousness. 

It is as if the very bedrock of our national morality and compassion has been exploded into fragments of hate and anger and division and far too many of what was once a community of caring and united people have been corrupted and betrayed by this dark magical force that has given license to the worst of us to be heard above the rest. 

These are children, and they are being abused by the government of the United States of America. Never did I think until this moment that I would ever write a sentence like that. My heart swells, like yours would, Charlie Williams, at this grave and sinful pass that we have come to. Yes, we Americans have allowed our national conscience to be stifled while we lowered our heads in constant gaze at the so-called social media which has replaced true human discourse. We have allowed the seeds of racism and misogyny and, yes, evil, that have always lain beneath the surface of our country’s conscience to finally sprout and flourish – again – nourished by a maniac whose every breath is a transaction with the devil who seems so much closer to reigning on earth as well as in hell.

Yet the heavens will not be long startled. We must believe that. And we are the heavens. We must awaken from the fugue state of apathy and willful ignorance which has led us to this dark and threatening place. We must retrace history and overthrow a tyrant in the making. Each of us must enter the battle in our own way, do what we can and must – and then do more. 

And let the children walk free.