Waiting to Exhale

Disaster can lurk around any corner and jump out to surprise us, but this year-long march up to tomorrow is another feeling altogether. It’s both exciting and maddening to think that we can control whether we drive ourselves over the cliff or turn back in time to the road home. The feelings range from performing the music you’ve spent the year practicing and sitting on Death Row waiting for a stay of execution. 

 

Here we are and it’s all over but the shoutin’ and how I long for the shout of relief and exultation over the cry of outrage and disbelief. I’m trying to stay positive and lightly embrace Hope, calling on both the gods and the swing state voters to do the right thing. 

 

And so in what perhaps may be the most dramatically important day of my 69 years on this Earth, I invoke this poem by Sheenagh Pugh to lift us over the threshold to victory: 

 

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

faces down frost, green thrives, the crops don’t fail,

Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

 

A people sometimes will step back from war;

elect an honest man, decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

 

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss, sometimes we as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

 

May it happen for us.