If I don’t want to start the day with the heaviness of the world, or the anger over our present moment, I would do well to avoid the news and my handheld sadness machine. Yet, mixed among the daily frustrations and outrage are poems and painting and things that speak the soul’s deeper truths. My handheld sadness machine, it turns out, is also capable of delivering moments of awe or grace or soft-spoken understanding.
Just this morning, that same machine with its sadness/outrage apps told me, “I think we all speak a different kind of language / than each other, but you sound a whole lot like coffee on a / Sunday morning and the rain falling bitter against the windowpane.” from “He Loves the Rain” by Shinji Moon. That same handheld portal gave me the opening lines of the poem “A Love Letter to My Panic // A Love Letter to My Husband” by Hala Alyan, which read, “You’re as pretty as a shark. I never thanked you for the / supermarket flowers, those September windows opening // and shutting like eyelashes…”
I’ve known the language of Sunday coffee, the rain against the windowpane. I’ve bought the supermarket flowers and I’ve forgotten to thank others for their credible gestures and gifts.