What Is Not Lost

Rosh Hashanah

i bear witness to no thing

more human than hate

i bear witness to no thing

more human than love

apples and honey

apples and honey

what is not lost is paradise

— lucille clifton

Right after reading the news, the baby still wouldn’t sleep. She shifted from breast to breast, restless. I almost lost my patience. But she should be restless in this world. We all should.

I want her to forgive me for bringing her here.

Right before she succumbed to sleep, she sat up straight and looked fiercely over my shoulder. She looked as if she was seeing something new.

I turned to see what she saw. It was a reproduction of a papyrus piece. An Egyptian God and Goddess—the Goddess on her throne, the God paying tribute, hieroglyphics overhead.

My great aunt Sarah had bought it on a trip to Egypt, sometime in the 1960s. Was it before or after this country’s rules had changed? I don’t know. I cannot say. I do know that when the baby looked up at the tourist tchotchke, I felt something maybe a little bit better.

Maybe she’s looking at another world all together. Another possibility. A better one than any of us can even imagine in this moment.

That’s magical thinking, of the deepest kind. But I have to think that the supreme court was packed full of racist, sexist fucks when my great Aunt Sarah took herself to Egypt and rode a camel and brought back a piece of somewhere else. So. These things matter but we do the life we can, anyways.

It’s funny. Right before I opened up twitter and read the news, I was thinking, literally thinking “Focus on what you can control. Don’t cling to pessimism. The world can still surprise you with good.”

What a laugh. What a joke. I hope to God and Goddess that it’s true.