And now it’s looking like the crises
are never going to end.
New cities are starting to bend
as the tsunamic pathogen
buckles the hospitals,
pressing politicians
to chase the people back inside
if they have the sense to listen.

Pockets of rebels
won’t lower their masks to scream
because they already aren’t wearing them.
Of course, they have rights to their opinions
but the logic of denial
is the very mud our country is currently stuck in.
(There, I said it.)
That’s denial of all issues, too
from disease to oppression to brutality and beyond.
Anything challenging a sense of comfort
is an enemy to be shut down and ignored,
the people saying,
Please, just leave me alone to live my normal life!

Parable of the sower, anyone?
Some people really are the seed fallen on the barren path.
But the rest of us must strive to simultaneously be
the seed falling into the good soil
and the sowers moving past (not trampling)
those people stuck on the path
to tend to the soils of rocks and thorns,
helping them be just as good.

We have to remain diligent, too.
So often we do just enough about a problem
that we don’t have to think about it anymore
and that’s why our problems
keep coming back!
It’s inspiring, the fight we have put on this time
but cops will eventually kill more innocent people
if we let our outrage die.
It’s a process repeated so many times,
life’s literally spelling it out for us
with the metaphor of a pandemic.

Our crises are as diverse
as the people who are suffering them.
We all long for a normal
but it can’t be the normal we just lost.
Those of us committed to finding the greater good,
this is our chance and our duty
to make sure the world comes out better.
I will be fighting right beside you
and I pray I have done some good
with the words that I write
and I deeply apologize
if there are any failures in what I say.

But I do see a people growing more powerful,
a people who by working together,
wearing our masks and loving each other,
will rise above every war that faces us,
who will place every crisis that plagues us
firmly in the past.
Though the solutions to all the individual issues
are wildly different
and incredibly complex to simultaneously pull off,
I have nothing but faith
we will conquer these, our greatest troubles.