Remembering a Q-tip

It's Odin's day . . . another heat-dome is making a brief revisit to Okieland . . .

“We chase the approval of strangers on our phones; we build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves and then wonder why we feel so alone.” – Barach Obama at the DNC convention, recently concluded, prompting Soren to “Look Up.”

Richard Wright was born on this day in 1908. The novelist (Native Son) was born born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi.

Beyoncé turns 43 today. The Grammy Award record holder, 32 times so far in her career, was born in 1981 Houston, Texas.

...nature has been so relentlessly assaulted that it is easy to forget to look at a tree, a sky, a flower emerging in a sea of trash. – bell hooks in today's Meditation from the CAC.

Remembering Charlie Bethel, who would have been 59 yesterday.

Charlie Q-Tip

– composing this poem continues to take a long time.

Thursday, September 03, 2015. Your 50th,

That was the day after you arrived for an extended stay.

An opportunity we never completely embraced

as adult father and son, tho adult

was a bit of misnomer for us both

looking back, tho we indeed tried.

Cousin Judy says, and she should know,

this hollow space in my heart left

when you left too early this world

will never fill. Yet no day goes by

that I fail to recall some

somehow significant triviality.

On the 3rd of 2015 September

you emerged from the shower

inquiring if I had a Q-Tip,

which I did. Nine years and

several boxes later, each day

exiting the shower

I reach for the Q-Tips.

Which may explain,

should it occur,

why, on the day of my last

breath, I ask for

one.

Your death stripped me,

your mother, if I may speak for her,

and many, many whose lives

you touched more than once,

to the bone.

New bone takes time

as do neurons finding new pathways

amid new muscle and tendon

and some mysterious new-found trust —

An orchestration not of our doing,

but of and by a learning

to be.

— jab