We are here for each other

Earlier in the week as I was repairing several hundred damaged seedling trees that were planted last year and the year before and the year before that, there was a moment when exhaustion overcame me and I lay on the ground to recover both my physical strength and the emotional resolve to finish the task at hand. The extended drought had diminished fodder for the wallabies and, in their desperation to find food, they pushed and trampled the bags surrounding the seedlings in order to nibble on the succulent young foliage.

Everywhere I looked, the wounded.

For fourteen years now I have looked upon the destruction caused by fierce, drying winds and the numerous starving wallabies. While wanting the animals to survive, I also want the young trees to survive. Looking at the continuous devastation can, at times, drop me. Coming across a tree striped of all its leaves, when only a month ago it was nearly three feet tall and bursting to reach the sky, forces me to take a breath and find that deep reserve of energy to, once again, re-stake, re-mat and re-bag what is left. Sometimes it is only a stubble, smaller than when it was planted. Though many trees have been planted, each is as a child to me and all their collective tiny hurts can add up to something overwhelming.

Somehow, I get through the day and walk home knowing that I did the only thing I could do: fix the wounded one by one and hope.

Hope for their survival. Hope that they’ll sprout new leaves, new branches and make it through the coming year without being trampled down yet again.

In an odd way, their struggle is my struggle. Their survival is my survival; our survival. Our little group’s survival is the world’s survival.

With the recent war in Lebanon in mind and while pondering how to write the above story of the trees into today’s blog, I came across this Viet Nam war poem by John Balaban. I can’t quite articulate how it relates, but there is a connection here somewhere between the lines and between the lives of the trees, the wallabies, myself and the human family of people in the poem.

WORDS FOR MY DAUGHTER

About eight of us were nailing up forts
in the mulberry grove behind Reds’ house
when his mother started screeching and
all of us froze except Reds—fourteen, huge
as a hippo—who sprang out of the tree so fast
the branch nearly bobbed me off. So fast,
he hit the ground running, hammer in hand,
and seconds after he got in the house
we heard thumps like someone beating a tire
off a rim…..his dad’s howls the screen door
banging open….Saw….Reds barreling out
through the tall weeds towards the highway
the father stumbling after his fat son
who never looked back across the thick swale
of teasel and black-eyed Susans until it was safe
to yell fuck you at the skinny drunk
stamping around barefoot and holding his ribs.

Another time, the Connelly kid came home to find
his alcoholic mother getting fucked by the milkman.
Bobby broke a milk bottle and jabbed the guy
humping on his mom. I think it really happened
because none of us would loosely mention that
wraith of a woman who slippered around her house
and never talked to anyone, not even her kids.

Once a girl ran past my porch
with a dart in her back, her open mouth
pumping like a guppy’s, her eyes wild.
Later that summer, or maybe the next,
the kids hung her brother from an oak.
Before they hoisted him, yowling and heavy
on the clothesline, they made him claw the creekbank
and eat worms. I don’t know why his neck didn’t snap.

Reds had another nickname you couldn’t say
or he’d beat you up: “Honeybun.”
His dad called him that when Reds was little.

So, these were my playmates. I love them still
for their justice and valor and desperate loves
twisted in shapes of hammer and shard.
I want you to know about their pain
and about the pain they could loose on others.
If you’re reading this, I hope you will think,
Well, my dad had it rough as a kid, so what?
If you’re reading this, you can read the news
and you know that children suffer worse.

Worse for me is a cloud of memories
still drifting off the South China Sea,
like the nine-year-old boy, naked and lacerated,
thrashing in his pee on a steel operating table
and yelling “Dau. Dau,” while I , trying to translate
in the mayhem of Tet for surgeons who didn’t know
who this boy was or what happened to him, kept asking
“Where? Where’s the pain?” until a surgeon
said “Forget it. His ears are blown.”

I remember your first Halloween
when I held you on my chest and rocked you,
so small your toes didn’t touch my lap
as I smelled your fragrant peony head
and cried because I was so happy and because
I heard, in no metaphorical way, the awful chorus
of Soeur Anicet’s orphans writhing in their cribs.
Then the doorbell rang and a tiny Green Beret
was saying trick or treat and I thought “oh oh”
but remembered it was Halloween and where I was.
I smiled at the evil midget, his map light and night
paint, his toy knife for slitting throats, said,
“How ya doin’, soldier?” and, still holding you asleep
in my arms, gave him a Mars bar. To his father
waiting outside in fatigues I hissed, “You shit,”
and saw us, child, in a pose I know too well.

I want you to know the worst and be free from it.
I want you to know the worst and still find good.
Day by day, as you play nearby or laugh
with the ladies at People’s Bank as we go around town
and I find myself beaming like a fool,
I suspect I am here less for your protection
than you are here for mine, as if you were sent
to call me back into our helpless tribe.

John Balaban