Real Solace

Too much, too much.

How to console, this will be an ongoing question.

 How to change, what to do to help.

At the moment, I am grateful to Ellen Wade Beals, and glad that her anthology, Solace in So Many Words, begun when she wanted to give solace after 9/11, is coming out now.

Here are a few excerpts:

From "Bleeding Heart," by Constance Vogel Adamkeiwicz, the first poem in the book:

Amid the rubble
of demolition,
where nothing else has survived,
a bleeding heart grows,
red blood dripping
from delicate arcs.

In my own flower bed, the tiny first spikes of bleeding heart are coming up amid the tulip spears.

From "And What If I Spoke of Despair" by Ellen Bass:

And what if I spoke of despair--who doesn't
feel it? Who doesn't know the way it seizes,
leaving us limp, deafened by the slosh
of our own blood, rushing
through the narrow, personal
channels of grief. It's beauty
that brings it on, calls it out from the wings
for one more song.

One more song, one more song of beauty, let us keep singing.