The news is awful: planes shot out of the air, children filling refugee camps...in the U.S., hundreds of girls kidnapped, boys killed by bombs on a beach. Maybe it has always been so, but this summer seems especially horrible. The poet Mary Oliver speaks to my feelings:
The Morning Paper
Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition
is the best
for by evening you know that you at least
have lived through another day)
and let the disasters, the unbelievable
yet approved decisions,
soak in.
I don't need to name the countries,
ours among them.
What keeps us from falling down, our faces
to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?
From A Thousand Mornings, published by Penguin Books, 2012.
