MY HEART GOES OUT
by Joan Mazza
The morning after the storm. Photo tweeted by @miguelmarquez.
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to those many people who lost their homes, flattened and inundated by Hurricane Ian’s smack down. To people sifting through mud and debris to salvage what’s useful, from homes without roofs. The videos and photos are published of houses floating away, smashed. Pets gone. My heart goes out to the people of Pakistan weeks after one third of their country was flooded and now their children are dying of cholera. Swathes of forests have burned all over the world. Whales are eating plastic because the ocean is full of it. Covid isn’t over. People are dying every day, gasping for breath. My heart goes out to those too cold or too hot, breathing mold or dust or smoke and ash. For my friends Shaun and Karen in a marathon to outrun cancer. For Charlotte who said goodbye to her beloved hound Maggie after sixteen years. For everyone suffering as humans always have in a world that throws us beauty and abundance, love, pleasure, and plush comforts, leaves us anticipating, eager for more, and then snatches it all away. My heart goes out to you, to us.
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Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Poet Lore, Slant, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia and writes every day.
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BLESSING THE ANIMALS
by David Chorlton
On and around The Feast of St. Francis, October 4 this year, many churches organize a Blessing of the Animals to which dogs, cats, bird, bunnies, ponies, chickens, and all creatures great and small are welcome.
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Here’s a cat who’d take the dinner from a china plate but bless her anyway; she doesn’t know the rules of etiquette. Consider the coyote blessed when he stops in the middle of the street and looks back at a pedestrian his wildness has touched. Bless the starlings who were fruitful and multiplied from coast to coast, and bless the common pigeon for turning waste lots into food. Bless the rattlesnake who curls up at a trail’s edge by stepping carefully around him, and save for the jaguar who returns to ancient hunting grounds a special blessing that will follow him through darkness. Shall we dare to shower favor on the rats who climb the final daylight and cavort in yards and vegetable beds? Or spare an extra prayer for the Great horned owl when he is done with ferrying souls to comfort and a resting place? When the Cooper’s hawk is waiting for a mourning dove, be generous as this world in which an ocean is the predator and a river is the prey.
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David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and has shared home with many cats, birds, and occasionally dogs. The creatures who visit his yard appear frequently in his new book Poetry Mountain from Cholla Needles in Joshua Tree, CA., who also published the poems his white cat Raissa wrote in the late Clinton years (of a very concrete nature) in a little book called Gilded Snowalong with her owner's commentary.