Little Brown Pools
I prayed for rain last night. Now, I am not one to pray, not one for praying (towards where? for what? to whom?) but I did then and just for that, for rain, that I might not need to hear the carbides and flares of a celebratory farce.
Never mind the headache in my eye; minding instead the way fireworks work themselves in the nerves of the dog two rooms away, or into the dogs and cats straying across the unlit yards of our sloping neighborhood, or my neighbors seeking calm and asylum hearing the sound of propaganda and memory.
I do, admittedly have something to celebrate: I celebrate my ancestors surviving this place inside my chromosomes. I can’t hear them in the tone of my inside voice but know they’re there.
A well-known writer wrote yesterday that enslavement was “not atypical” but only seemed barbaric “at the time” before comparing the perception of chattel slavery then and eating meat now as relatively similar. Products of their times, if you will. This is very easy to say if the allostatic load of your ancestors was never forged on farms, in fields or auction blocks.
I might have prayed again for acid rain to visit her garden had I not remembered the small but no less precious life that lives beside her—despite her, or perhaps, in spite of her. Still, I can’t say that my headache’s gone away but at least it’s the fifth of July and, with the first steps outside, the soil sops and forms little brown pools shaped like the soles of my shoes.