After Anne Lamott
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My son would come home from college, pull out the dozens of photo albums I assembled
over the years. Together we’d laugh at how young we all were, remember our trips,
our adventures, the birthday parties. My more recent photos are stuck in my phone,
no longer easily available to share or reminisce as though life ended in 2005.
I hear myself saying things like, I miss the old days, before drones and internet,
when cameras had film, and a day at the beach meant lying supine in the sun
as we swatted the flies and bees.
Yet, every family has their catastrophes, every era, its own crises to contend with.
Our family still grieves a devastating plane crash, life-changing diagnoses, family
estrangements all set against the crashing of the World Trade Center, horrendous
school shootings, racial strife, and endless war.
I sit on a beach and the buzzing above isn’t a mosquito, while my photos float
up to the clouds, and our government catapults us back to vaccination-free days, cuts
money for research, erases history and people, sends women to the alleys and even to jail.
I’m left speechless and hopeless, when for so long, despite it all, I felt hopeful,
that we were moving forward if ever so slowly.
Maybe I’ll scroll through each photo, choose favorites, send them out
to be printed, organize them in albums labeled by years.
It’s overwhelming and tedious; but I can’t sit back and watch
our story end here.
A sliver of moon
reclaims the star-studded sky,
waxing resilience
Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in Gyroscope Review, Zig Zag Lit Mag, Oddball Magazine, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, One Art: a journal of poetry, Nick Virgillio’s Haiku in Action, Pure Haiku, and elsewhere. Laurie won first place in poetry at the 2023 Marblehead, MA Festival of the Arts.
