COVID-19

   For all my friends

I talk to myself so I can hear my voice say beautiful things…

Put me in the garden, under the peony bush

and leave me there until I am drunk on perfume.

Put me under the wren’s nest 

so I can hear the babies calling for food.

Put me in the center of the world so when I  shout, 

everyone will hear me

LOVE!

and that velvet word will echo and echo.

My blood is running too fast for my heart. Everyone, 

stop and feel your own, feel your own blood racing.

Put me in the center of the world and I will shout,

TOUCH YOUR NEIGHBOR’S HEART!

  TOUCH IT! TOUCH IT! TOUCH IT!

© Evie Safran, 2021

The President of the Principality of Asturias, Adrián Barbón,
kneels before a memorial in memory of the victims
of the coronavirus ~ from Wikimedia Commons     

Christmas Eve on a New York Subway

It was long ago, living in New York,

thrift store shopping on the Upper East Side

on a snowy Christmas Eve.

My best friend and me,

my first year back from Hawaii,

traipsing from store to store,

plundering the exquisite cast-aways

of the rich and famous,

laughing as we paid Wal-Mart prices

for Bloomingdale’s goods.

Walking the streets of Madison Avenue

we were the poor relatives from Brooklyn,

living in a broken-down building on the edge of Bed-Stuy,

paying $80 for rent,

setting roach traps every night before bed,

living on mac and cheese and tuna casserole.

The subway, our magic carpet ride,

transported us Uptown, to indulge our pleasure of “thrifting,”

our friendship deepened by the love of the hunt,

the clicking of the hangers as we pushed through

dresses, sweaters, pants, shirts, trying on shoes 

and hats and scarves, so joyful to find a bargain

that matched our desire for that very thing,

and smug, thinking we looked like a million bucks.

We walked miles in that pure snow,

on those safe streets,

welcoming shops full of abundance

and the good cheer of Christmas in the City,

softened, everything softened

by snow, Christmas lights, happy people.

It was night as we neared the subway

to go home.  Gathering our bags

around us, we sat down on the long bench

that ran the length of the train car.

We lurched toward the next stop.

The doors opened and a drunk man got on.

He looked around, and seeing the bench empty,

staggered forward, sat down beside me,

put his head in my lap,

and fell asleep. 

© Evie Safran, 2018

Snow in New York, by Robert Henri
in the collection of the National Gallery of Art
from Wikimedia Commons

View from the Fifth Floor

The bamboo wood plays shadows 

on the full moon framed in the window,

a glimpse of the universe spreading, 

spreading past all comprehension.

Put your head on the pillow.

Set your slippers by the bed

as sentinels waiting for the dawn.

Rise, swivel to touch the floor.

Light, glasses, radio, hot coffee.

Relief of knowing

you can coordinate each effort,

lack of surprises

a relief.

The pain of a divided world presses in. 

The view from the bedroom window

is a fraction of the real world.

Beneath, it is Guernica.

You have seen ages pass,

and now the cups of coffee are numbered.

Where is solace now?

Slippers by the bed,

the moon in your window?

The necessity of awareness,

or the losing of it?

© Evie Safran, 2018

Girl and the Moon
by the Estonian painter Karl Pärsimägi
from Wikimedia Commons
In public domain in the United States

Weeds Don’t Cry

Weeds don’t cry.

They stand stalwart 

in fields of corn,

in precise gardens of boxwood and lavender,

in chummy closeness with thyme and sage.

Then someone will shout:

“Pull up those damn weeds,”

and hands of all ages 

will strain against the  strength 

of those orphans of wildness and 

pull, pull, pull, 

or put foot to spade and

slice down to clear the root. 

In my salad days,

I pulled up sheaves of five foot tall

lamb's quarters to feed the breeder pigs. 

Lamb’s quarters, dandelion, amaranth, clover -

they grew between the crops and the rocks,

nourishing the pigs till the corn came in.

Someone once told me

that I was a weed - 

resilient, strong, able to flourish

in adverse conditions.

And I carried that thought 

throughout my life,

and felt proud ….

For when someone tells you that,

you never forget it. 

After years of garden work,

here’s how I feel about weeds:

I love them.

Kneeling in the middle

of  my tomato plants, 

I am contemplative and peaceful

as my reedy hands pull and pull and pull,

piling up the weeds of my past,

each a remembrance, 

an homage to enduring.

© Evie Safran, 2017

Men with picks and hoes clearing weeds in a field
Pullenvale, 1889
Photo held by John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Winter in Upstate NewYork, 1977

She tunnels out of her house 

through a mantel of snow

six feet high,

carrying her young son

to the barn.  She breaks

up a bunch of hay bales,

nesting him in the middle,

close to the cows.

She buries her head 

in the flank of the cow 

while she milks, thankful 

for its warm body and breath.

She’s swinging the pick-ax hard

through the ice in a trough

’til she chops a hole big enough

for a bucket to fill with water.

Running back and forth 

to water the cows, pigs,

horses, chickens.  The water

is fast-freezing in the bucket.

The temperature is windchill -40 degrees

for ten days.

Back home, she stokes the wood stove.

They sit within its three feet

of warmth, in their hats and coats.

All that’s left to burn is wet pine

and she burns it. 

Every cell in her body is an ice pellet.

The snow keeps falling.

By morning, the door won’t open.

If this was Antarctica, 

she would be better prepared,

mindful and in sync with her purpose.

Here, it’s all muscle-memory:  Survival.

Keep herself, her son, and the animals

from freezing to death.

There is a treacherous beauty

in the landscape, a silence

that only deep snow on farmland

seems capable of.

This span of time, of snow, wind and cold,

will just be another conversation with friends

in a few months.  But she

will remember it for years

and years as the time she overcame 

disbelief in herself.

© Evie Safran, 2017

"Old farm at Overtown in deep snow"
by Richard Johnson
from the Geography Project collection
from Wikimedia Commons

Before and After

The night the bat flew in was the tipping point.

The tar paper stapled to the wood-framed maw of my shack

came away on a windy winter’s night in Upstate NY.

The bat, sensing no difference between the dark inside me and out,

flew in, settled upside down in its new cave.  

It was a homesteading year for me and my young son,

a way to keep him with me and our extended family,

working the land, plenty to eat, little money.

I milked cows, harvested honey from the bees, 

stayed awake all night with the birthing sows, 

watching that they didn’t roll over on their babies.

I fed the chickens, the horses, the cows, the pigs, 

jammed the pick through the ice in -40 degree winters 

to get water for the livestock,

slept in coat and hat and burned green pine

in the wood stove; burned anything I could get my hands on 

til the chimney caught fire from the creosote.

I named my shack “Sadness.”

I did nothing well enough to feel proud;

I worked hard but felt no connection to my tasks, 

no love for the animals or myself.

Everything was a burden, a weight filling my stomach,

a confirmation of  failure.

I couldn’t adjust to this life and its demands.

Every day was winter.

I want to go back to the minute 

before the bat flew into my house.

I sat in darkness with the bat.

I sat, thinking of the irony of yearning for the routine I hated - 

the milking, the mucking out, the infinity of farm life -

yearning for the familiar misery of it.

I watched my son, sleeping in his crib, 

unaware of the little drama around him.

I opened the door and shone the flashlight til I found the bat on a cross-beam.

I stood on a chair and threw a blanket over it, 

trembling that it would escape, would settle again,

too high for me to reach.

The bat fluttered as I held tight.

I walked away from the shack,

unfolded a corner of the blanket and ran back inside. 

In the morning, I climbed high on a ladder

and, with a staple gun, tacked the tar paper back to the wood frame.

I did it all in a state of numbness,

barely present, yet knowing  

somewhere in my primitive brain,

that if I kept on, 

kept on doing everything,

I would be transformed.

© Evie Safran, 2016

Photograph of a Woman with a Hay Stack
from the NARA archives
Wikimedia Commons

For the King of Candy Land: My Son Kai, May 2016

“Candy Land, Life, Monopoly,” my son replied 

when I asked “Do you remember us playing marathon tournaments

of board games when you were a kid?”

This, on the way to the airport

where he will fly to California,

back to his home  and his work.

He is vexed by my asking such a trivial question 

while his thoughts swirl around his travel plans, the work that awaits him,

the transition from his visit with me to his life on the West Coast....

Yet, on his face, I see the boy who loved to play, 

who kept his Monopoly money in neat piles, color-coded 

and at the ready to buy another house or hotel; who outwitted

me at Checkers, making kings that jumped up and over 

and trapped me in the back row; and I, the Queen of Ping Pong,

falling in defeat to the child who outwitted me with speed and stamina.

Later that night, after he called to tell me he’d arrived safely,

I thought about all the years I read to him, lying on the bed

with Babar the Elephant and Conan the Barbarian.  

After he learned to read, I remember thinking, “I’ve lost my job,” 

but no, he brought home “The Hound of the Baskervilles,

and we took turns reading to each  other.

We know our children for so long as children

that when they grow up, we relate to what we know best 

about them. It seems unfair to them, yet inevitable to us.

We look for some overlap, something familiar to connect

the past to the present.  What in the man is still like the boy?

And I remember:  whenever he visits, we talk about books

and he reads to me.  And, though he doesn’t call to me from the next room, 

he calls.

© Evie Safran, 2016

Mother and her child reading scripture
Photo by Dr. Avishai Teiher
Pikiwiki Israel
from Wikimedia Commons

Look in My Window

               So, look in my window.  Stare at me.  Mock me.

What do you think you see?

A white haired woman standing by the counter, cooking?

I hear you thinking, "Why does she stand there,

day after day, just cooking, cooking?

She's alone, who the hell will eat all that food?"

Might you, peeking in my window, see more than this chopping old fool?

Might you think, "There's a person who wants to be useful."

It is painful when you are more than the world wants.

Energy imploding, cells discouraged from replicating,

wrinkles manifest like uncooked ramen noodles.

It is a fact of this world that we must fight to be visible, useful, appreciated,

as the years pile up like chicken bones tossed in the grass after a picnic.

Fight.  What a word...

In aging, who wants to fight?

You, in the window, why don't you turn away?  What's the fascination?

Could you possibly be thinking that I have something to give you?

I could make you laugh; I could make you cry; I could make you think;

I could feed you.

You think I am used up, but you don't understand:  I want to be used up -

when I can't light the oven anymore.

Big pots of soup, whole baked chickens, yeasty loaves of bread,

gallon jars of kim chee, cookie sheets of roasted apples and peaches.

© Evie Safran, 2015

"Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace"
Vincent van Gogh, 1885
Metropolitan Museum of Art
from Wikimedia Commons