I Can’t Go On. I’ll Go On.

- after Beckett


Here we are, making plans
to meet again soon in this new
year, to catch up over coffee or 
maybe take a walk on a day that slips
rare warmth between weeks of cold  
and miserable rain. As we did last 
time, we'll bring updates— stories 
of any small brightness despite 
layoffs and a son's crippling 
despair, the still raw grief 
of a widow almost a decade after 
her husband's passing. The news, 
yet again, of blatant injustice.
Disappearances and deaths 
in our neighborhoods, another 
family bereft of a mother tonight. 
What's worse is that evil, that snake 
slithering through the grass since 
the world began, has been ramping up
its falsehood campaign. How we should
just learn to wear something called 
resilience in the face of loss. How,
since everything in life is provisional
anyway, we should cultivate an attitude
of resigned acceptance— Too much. No use,
give up. Can't expect to change it. But
what is it that instinctively makes us
wrap our arms around each other, open our
hearts inside unbearable sorrow? In such 
holding, we feel the weight of what was 
taken, what could still be lost. If 
we did not hold each other, the world 
would truly have ended. We would not 
have the strength to set another place 
at the table, to wrap a blanket 
around the shoulders of the one 
who can't stop trembling.