Slow Seed
Damage lies also in the pace, the cold eye,
one disaster after another. Earthquake buries village.
Carload of teenagers disappears on unrepaired bridge.
Wildfires in California hit eightieth day.
Monday’s headlines.
How does compassion not peel off?
Go to the garden, plant tomato seeds, peppers.
Try to grow more latitude for grief.
Once people endured only the nearby. A father
on the next farm lost his wife to childbirth, a small community
of mourning stepped up. One nursed the newborn,
another carried the toddler.
Casseroles, lemon cakes. They halved a smoked ham,
plowed his field. Calamity came down
but there was time and help to bear its weight.
Who’s built to feel a world’s suffering?
Listen to a nurse tell how she holds a phone for hours
as dying patients Facetime family.
Twenty in four days.
Tell me how she does this.
Practice slow. Days for a seed to unfurl a shoot,
yawn out true leaves. Stems creep upward like prayers.
Weeks to make a flower, more to shape fruit.
The organ of the heart starts
as embryonic germ. Without generosity of time,
no auricles fuse, no septa firm, no arterial stalks emerge.
No pink muscled plumpness, no steady drum.