You Love Thursdays

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Today, between sessions with writing students focused on critiquing military strategy, I listened to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. I stopped my work and wrote, beginning on our bus ride to Tacoma this morning. 

Oh Mae. I wonder where you are standing as you read this, years from now. I wonder if I've remembered well enough. I wonder what you're holding.

You do seem to love Thursdays, truly, Mae. And I am glad. Even though we've talked about what it means for women to be cut down, left out, robbed, doubted, shamed. You wake up every morning and ask if it is Thursday, as if now it will all change.

My poem is for you, as so many of them are.

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Dear Mae,

It is Thursday. You love Thursdays

because your preschool class

visits the children’s museum

one floor above its classroom

and if you are line leader you get

to push the elevator’s call button.

You love elevators. You like

the way it feels to rise and rise

independently, your feet firmly planted.

Our bus left one minute ahead

of schedule this morning. We sat

closest to the exit where I read

a picture book quietly for you,

the moral clear as a confession:

sometimes we get what we want,

sometimes we get what we don’t.

The main character is a girl

who does not want to wear a jacket.

Eventually, she wears what she's told

and finds happiness elsewhere.

You called her story true and said

there have been times when

you did not want what you got.

I said you are four. Buckle up,

I wanted to say, but I didn’t

because my mouth was full of hope.

Then I read my own book,

a black man’s memoir, the words

bursting open soundlessly

behind my eyes. I wondered

if you could see the flash

of each explosion. I dropped you off

and walked to work, where I poured

comments in red down the margins

of several essays. Tiny fires

I am paid to start. A TV nearby

showed a woman, surrounded

by senators, dismantling trauma

one trigger and spring at a time

then rebuilding it, each piece

burning in her hands. The trauma

was hers, but the blueprint 

seemed part mine, part ours.

Before I picked you up from school

I sat in a coffee shop with two exits.

I thought, what if I forget this?

What will I say when they ask

how I left, and why don’t I remember,

when I wrote it all down for you?