Molly Fisk
Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty and Everything But the Kitchen Skunk, among other titles. She edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, and has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Walking Wheel, her next collection, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
Photo Credit: John Taber
Waving
Maybe I don’t try hard enough.
Maybe the ones I admire have skill
beyond my grasp, their synapses
firing faster, beating greater hearts.
I am puny. I am restricted. Alas,
the self looking back at the self
while missiles fire and hospitals explode
around previous common suffering.
Could there be anything useful to say?
And someone to say it — anyone?
Everyone. Breathe in sorrow,
exhale dignity, lovingkindness.
To stop a missile, you stop the plane
refueling, the burr of metal
on metal to shape the housing,
you don’t extrude or load, you pay
the makers a living wage to make
something else. It is rocket science.
And simple, like the shape
of the nurse’s forearm blown above us,
a bird, a signal, the hand looks like
it’s waving. Those with money
don’t need more money, a seaport,
they have plenty of shoes. The killing
is made general, is made abstract
to blind us. In a poem, you earn
your abstractions — the living human
mind comprehends specifics. A breath.
An arm. That bullet shape. Now
we are located.
