Disconnect

I don't even know how to reconcile the personal and the political these days. How to say (even silently, to myself only) I had a good winter break, reading several books and finishing my own collection of haiku while sending another poetry manuscript out to a prospective publisher...How to be so self-centered when this is one of the worst Januaries my country has ever faced, and things are getting worse every day? People who had jobs—good jobs, careers in which they helped other people stay safe and whole—those people haven't been paid now for a month.

There is no reconciliation to be had, and that's the problem. The disconnect in our politicians' actions between the personal and the political has deposited us in this no-person's-land of dissociation. Even healing, even singing the ancestors' songs, even quiet contemplation are not safe (those things were, if we think back a couple of years, actually the first to go). We are a dysfunctional paradox, a new Ice Age society plummeting toward global warming.

I can only turn to poetry. Courting rejection; stepping out into the ice-coated world.