A Letter to Daughter, in seven parts: Part Seven

Part Seven:

This is what I choose to do with my every waking hour to my best sensible effort of living as the tortoise,

Which as you may know has the longest expected lifespan of the known animal kingdom,

So move with reptilian speed, contemplative, calculated, watching, noticing, asking,

But always moving, never prideful, arrogant, or haughty in haste

To assert that the last question has been asked

For if we prioritize our sexual reproduction and inform our minds that we are now candidates for death’s stinger; that we have done what we came here to do;

That post menopause your body and mind are flotsam to be cast back into the ocean,

Then our bodies will listen as we extinguish our flame

For the promise of a ghostly heaven from a man denying sex as holy vocation

Which pledges exclusivity on salvation bottled in a vile nostrum

Aghast! I can think of nothing more despicable to truncate your loveliness,

There is no age where you have permission to quit learning, to cease the stance

For there is no moment in this brief life where the need is not present for what you could be choosing

Need is more enumerated than molecules in the collective oceans or the sands upon their beaches

The questions which you have conquered are being freshly unearthed by each newborn and geriatric

Conference.  See their trove to impart a novel parcel of imagination for your travels

This inkling is life; this is purpose; this is the pollen in the breeze.

My daughter; I will die if I have not already;

As you will, as I have known that those we have, yet to and may never speak have died

Death is not to be feared; living without questioning is to be dreaded.

There is no balance found in life and death, there is no justice.

Starving bellies cannibalize themselves given time and the absence of nourishment.

Poverty turns into piracy whether the coast of Somali or the streets of Oakland

The slums off the South Freeway of Detroit or the stys of Wall Street

No individual can save or damn the world in perpetuity,

The best I have found is to merely pay attention,

Pay attention when those around you are in need;

Voice, ask, do, offer what you have so that part of their pain

Pricks you like a vaccine;

We must imbibe a part of other’s hurt to remain truly alive

So that we become stronger through antibodies of empathy

Guiding us like rebels in our blood against the selfishness of our genes

Compelling us to be divested of treks across canyons and mountaintops

The hurt from forcing our bare toes and knuckles to brush the jagged edges of rock

As we climb, as we pull others up, as we stretch our hands on the brink of plummeting to doom

If not for their sinew and striated muscle yanking us forward pass after pass in undulating reciprocity

This is the quest upon quest; I hope we each remain cognizant

Vigilant like fathers and mothers guarding their homes from Adolf Hitler’s yes-men or

Bashar Al-assad’s Syrian tyranny because these dead bodies stack

Like index cards of human failure, as one extreme to catalog

The look away from a vagabond under an overpass at a traffic light

As a couple drives to a Wednesday dinner prepared by a cook without affordable health care

Or the tithers itemizing tax deductions to build a church

While the immigrant who installed the sheet rock is extorted

So do bowels of poverty starve for love;

Everyone could be us, are us, will be us;

Peace, Love, We are all interconnected

So in this, maybe our genes and us may find agreement.