Begin Again

Today we move on. Yesterday the hometeam lost but the killer was found. News footage showed him ducking to get in the squad car. The D.A., who on Wednesday said the details at the scene were too gruesome to relate, yesterday related them all and the images bled like a stain into all my thoughts for the rest of my waking hours and on into the night.The town is full. The morbidly curious keep turning off Johnson Road onto Berkshire Drive looking for the quiet street where the quadruple murders took place. Today the self-confessed killer, husband and father and son-in-law to the slain will be arraigned in the Middlesex Superior Court, just down the road from the Y where I go every morning to keep my little teacup- tower of a skeleton upright and balanced.I think I will skip the Y this morning. This morning I will bring food to Uncle Ed and take him out if his pain will allow it. I’ve been super- busy all week so I know he must feel lonely. I will also gas up the car so nine people I love can use it as part of a small fleet headed tomorrow for Six Flags. And I’ll stop in at the House where these nine live to say goodbye to the two I will not see again until fall. They're off to summer programs, Davidson College and the University of Virginia.  One of these individuals  stands for justice and looks for the New Jerusalem; the other is a poet inside and out.  Speaking of that, I woke at 5:00 with a dozen apt snatches of verse for them circling in my head  and will now copy them down and drop them by: bread for the journey.One bit of verse I will copy here instead . It’s the last part of Marge Piercy’s  “The Art of Blessing the Day” and has in it the call to begin again that I know I need to hear today. Maybe some of you do too:

Attention is love, what we must give to children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can  with eyes and hands and tongues.  If you can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.