can you carry my heart today?

how do you enumerate the pain of helplessness?

how can you describe the weight of everything on your chest?
the accumulation of injustices.
the violence.
the genocides and school shootings and the mass extinctions

how do you get up and function in this world?
do another round of check-ins on zoom as you read the news about delivery drivers in washington dc being arrested by goons on the street while simply trying to deliver someone's dinner

of course we know we are not truly helpless. there is so much to be done. calls, events, protests, votes, organizing, everything.

sending your last $10 someone trying to flee to a place where they can find safety.

offering the woman at the stoplight a cool drink when it is 100 degrees.

but it is impossible to feel how our actions, right now, are enough.

how doing anything but stopping the whole world, shutting this all down, a general strike on life, would be enough

how do i do anything else when the only things that feel big enough feel so dangerous,

when the appropriate response feels like something you can't even say without danger.

if today, you can carry the weight of my heart, maybe tomorrow I can carry yours.

if today, i can make it, maybe you can too

and we can live to see the shoots of the new world, rising up to meet us, as we settle back down to the dirt.