Stuck in the Upside-Down

On lamentation and poetry, #Mothersforpeace

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Thank you for being here. If this post resonates with you, please click the heart at the bottom or share with a friend.

Photo by Prateek Gautam on Unsplash

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

It’s been a weird week. I had Covid last week. I’m better now and back in the world, but I have felt a little lost and confused this week. Maybe it’s the lingering chest cold. Maybe it’s the increased darkness. Maybe it’s the feeling of hopelessness over things I cannot control.

Have you seen Stranger Things? There’s an upside-down world in Stranger Things. It’s a parallel dimension which exists alongside the normal world. Everything is dark, decaying and desolate. Sometimes I feel like I get pulled into my own version of the upside-down. I am thankfully not at risk of being devoured by the Demogorgon, but my spirit is suffering all the same.

My friend Andrea Bass, who writes the Substack Literary Merit and leads our school’s multi-cultural book club with me, expressed similar feelings this week. She mentioned Cole Arthur Riley’s book, This Here Flesh, which is our fall book club read and a book Andrea and I both love. This week in book club we discussed Cole’s chapters on fear, belonging and lament. We spent a lot of time discussing belonging, we spent some time on fear, but we did not discuss lament. I haven’t done a good job rereading the chapters before book club, but Andrea’s post brought Cole’s words back to me.

“Lament is not anti-hope. It's not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It's an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling. And in the rubble, we say, God, you promised. We ask, Why? And how could we experience such a devastation if we were not on some mysterious plane, hoping for something different. Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament as deep as our hope.”

This week, I am lamenting.

Pádraig Ó Tuama posed a question in his Poetry Unbound Substack that I have been thinking about all week. Pádraig asks really good questions, which is an important skill in life. This week he asked, “Whether in the dramas of your own life, the questions about your country, or your thoughts about wider things in the world (they may all be the same, I know): what is it that you do not know? And what’s your response to this? Investigation? Surrender? Artistry? Apathy? Trust? Rage?”

As I worked to pull myself out of the upside-down, I thought about my answer to Pádraig’s question just a few days ago. I remembered I wrote my answer down, and as I went to look up what I had written, I was reminded about what Adrienne Maree Brown, author of Pleasure Activism, says about our identity. She says it is really important to say who we are every day, and it occurs to me that another reason why this is so important is that because sometimes when we are stuck in the upside-down, we forget who we are. That’s a lot scarier than a Demogorgon.

I found what I had written to myself, and I used those words as a rope to help myself climb out of the darkness. What do I do now? I make art, and I tend. I tend my garden. I tend my children. I tend the teachers and students and writers I teach. I tend my house (working on this one.) I think about opening our house and home to more children who might need a safe place. I work on my broken heart. I write poems for mothers who are waiting to hear news of the safety of their children. I write letters to my representatives even if I think my words will be wasted. I notice. I wonder. I sit in the silence.

When I am deep, deep in the upside down, and I feel really stuck, I turn to poetry. Sometimes when I am struggling, it is hard to focus on longer texts and even everyday tasks, but I usually always have enough space for a poem.

I subscribe to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s daily poems, and there were several days this week when I felt like she was writing directly to me. Her poem “On a Night When My Daughter is Struggling,” which is about loving and sitting together through all the brokenness, found me this week just where I needed it to.  

On a Night When My Daughter is Struggling

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I won’t tell her it is up to her

to repair the broken world.

Perhaps that comes later

with pen or needle, pointe shoe or song.

But for now, the thing to do

is sit together in the broken world

and feel how it is to be broken.

To let shame sit with us.

Let grief sit with us.

To feel the sharp nails of fear.

It is not wrong to feel small,

to feel frightened, to be lost.

Nor must we feel these things alone.

So for now, I sit with her in the brokenness

with no tools, no salve,

no metaphor of redemption.

It is not enough, perhaps

to meet brokenness

with nothing but love

and breath and a willingness

to be nowhere but here,

but in this broken moment,

It is everything.

I wrote a poem this week that was inspired by reading Rabbi Danya’s Life is a Sacred Text, “a peacemaking lens.” I would encourage you to read her full posts, but in this one, Rabbi Danya, shared the story of an Israeli mother who was begging her son’s captors to keep him safe. Rachel Goldberg is still waiting for her son. Since his capture by Hamas, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s bombardment. Ahmed al-Naouq lost 21 members of his family, 14 of whom were children, in one day.

It was in Rabbi Danya’s post that I first learned about the Parents’ Circle Families Forum, PCFF,—formerly the Bereaved Parents’ Circle. PCFF began in 1995. It is made up of hundreds of families whose common bond is that they have lost a close family member in the conflict. It is managed jointly by Palestinian and Israeli staff who organize dialogue groups in Israel and Palestine as well as in schools and also run youth summer camp and other joint programs that teach facilitation and dialogue.

Here is what the Palestinian chairman of PCFF wrote in response to the current crisis. “All of us, Israelis and Palestinians, pray that the damn war will end soon, that fighting and violence will not start elsewhere, and that the killing of innocents on both sides will stop. Despite the great crisis, we are still determined in our belief that only an agreement and a political solution will bring an end to the wars, the suffering, the blood, the dead, the wounded, the kidnaped, the captives and the imprisoned.”

My poem was also inspired by Julia Rose Lewis’ Substack post #MothersForPeace. “#Mothersforpeace is born from a knowing that art has the power to create change, to connect us to our empathy, to keep us human. Art allows us to stay open to grief as we stand alongside mothers, children and all people in the world facing unimaginable horrors.”

My friend Andrea reminded me in her post that while we can’t erase grief, we have a “sacred responsibility to create as much beauty as possible” in the spaces we inhabit.

Feast World Kitchen is a non-profit restaurant and catering company that exemplifies this belief. They create beauty in our city by empowering immigrants and former refugees, fostering a sense of belonging and culture-sharing through cooking. Tonight, they are hosting a special Mothers for Peace event where two local chefs, daughters of Palestinian and Israeli mothers, will come together to cook their family dishes and to unite in the belief that everyone has a “right to freedom, dignity, equality and safety.” All proceeds from this fundraiser will support PCFF. 

Tonight, I will sit with my family and eat the food that these mothers and daughters have cooked for us, food that has been prepared as an act of lament and an act of hope. I will hold my loved ones close, knowing that too many other mothers and fathers cannot do the same.

I’m going to close today with the poem I wrote. A special thank you to my Corbin Arts students for helping me revise this one. I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What resonates with you today? What are you lamenting? Do you also get stuck in the upside-down? How do you find your way out?

Waiting

Tonight, you are not home when I expect you

and for a brief moment, I fall into the dark

imagining a world without your humming

I sit in the stillness, waiting

while everything that seemed important falls to the floor

and all that is left is ache

to feel the cool of your skin

to run my fingers through your thick hair

to hear you sing “Come and Get Your Love,” over and over again

made-up lyrics in the mix

I want it all

Minutes later, you text to say that you are almost home

I pull myself up into the light

I wait until I hear the familiar click of the lock

the thud of your feet as you jump up the stairs

I roll over and return to sleep

In the morning, I rise and find you, sound asleep

I rustle my hands through your hair

and press my cheek to yours

For a brief moment the sky is pink, you will sleep through it

I will bear witness

I light a candle

Because you came home to me

I light a candle

For the mothers who are still waiting

Here’s the heart to click if this post resonated with you.