NOLA 10 by Molly Howes

Something cold has seeped into my heart.

It feels like grief.

Salt water surprises me, rising sometimes slowly like a tide,

Sometimes suddenly,

surging to find an outlet in my tears.

We pounded and lugged and taped

and sanded and painted and loved

with our strength, with our biceps.

We laughed and sang.

Our boots were on the ground

and we made the house strong,

strong against another storm.

But, now, afterwards,

feeling runs through me like a river,

finding its path through my own history,

through my frustrated compassion,

through my fear for the future of those children,

through the canyon of immense need we cannot fill,

through respect for the gifts Ms. Bailey

brings to her family and to us.

This grief is the second part of the gift.

First we do.

Then we feel:

We soak in the sad, slow floodwaters of misfortune

too great for us really to comprehend.

We try to take it in.

We try to love them more because of this pain they share with us.

Will we make the right kind of sense of this grief?

These tears?

This disorientation and distractibility?

Will it lead us to a higher ground,

a place we can stand with the Baileys

and the other families we have come to know?

What they give us is this chance to feel and grow,

this liquid, churning question

of our place in their lives

and their place in ours.