Someone to Blame

Someone to Blame

(“The Lord's acts of mercy indeed do not end, for His compassions do not fail.” Lamentations 3:22)

The troubles came out of nowhere like
the rain that hides behind the mountains.
Creeping hands of clouds loomed over the crags of
unconsciousness
and suddenly
we were drenched with invisibility.
Everything we could not see gripped us
so eyes that once saw clearly beyond the
eastern day
blinked away allergies and smoke.

We thought we knew it all,
we thought we knew cause and effect,
we thought the evil get punished,
we thought the righteous were without defect.
So why did it come to our town,
our holy little amendment on the river?
Why not upstream where the pollution
started, why not underground where the less polite
were hidden?

Our backs ached, our brains burned,
our hearts stopped when the power lines went down.
Once in a while the fog lifted
only to remind us what we were missing.
Still it seemed to all of us there must be
someone to blame. Someone had misspelled
the same day over and over again.

But above and below, while we sheltered at home,
the robins still sang, the dogs still pranced,
the children still played, though everything seemed to be
left to chance.
Someone hummed walking along the river,
someone looked for frogs on the bank.
Others slowly ate their lunches on picnic
benches wet from dew and rain.

It was not deliberate, but in the renewed silence
of water upon water
(the ions of joy and photons of vision)
we learned to breathe together again.
We saw again. Fireflies
lit up the night.