“I only bow and smile like a puppet, maintain a mask, while inside me there is suffering and great distress.” — Czeslaw Milosz
Ah, the universality of poetry, projection of emotion from another world, another era, compares the great distress of a postwar Pole Nobel poet whose son fired a gun out a motel window at an imaginary persecutor (which war -post — most all of them) but the lines as easily recall your marital discord, your workplace distress, your reaction to the last Hawaiian mochi muffin sold to the patron in line in front of you.
Suffering is relative.
Devotion to our place in line, our hearts set on mochi, our hearts in great distress at the state of the world, too large a problem to fix, stakes too high to bother picking up the phone to make a call, two minutes too much invested time, and what difference does one call make, and the high stakes of sounding stupid on the phone compared to the low stakes of ordering a muffin. ‘I’m a constituent of the assemblymember’s district, and I’m calling to ask that she support passing a 28th Amendment to the constitution regarding campaign finance reform” and “I’m a concerned community member calling in support of HER, a DACA eligible youth, who has been detained by border control. I urge Director HIM to grant HER, Claudia LAST NAME, prosecutorial discretion and release her immediately.” I can speak Spanish but I hesitate before pronouncing her name correctly, from there I read the script like it’s a script and stumble on the white man director’s LAST NAME ‘Archambault’ and three times on the word prosecutorial, so much easier to say, “One coffee and a Hawaiian mochi, please.”
When the barista tells me there are none left, I only bow and smile like a puppet, maintain a mask, while inside me there is suffering and great distress.
