Friday, December 09, 2011
Poem by Vilma Ginzberg
Miracles
Here I sit at my computer on 11-11-11, reading hours of emails and petitions and forwards about Delaware River fracking, and Mississippi’s rejection of personhood for women’s eggs, and move-your-money-day, and tar sands pipelines, and constitutional amendments to limit campaign funds, and Occupy Oakland’s massive challenge to stay non-violent in this most violence-racked city, and polar bears without ice floes, and torture of lesbians in Ecuador, and, and,............ and I am overcome with gratitude:
.... to Hippocrates and Hahnemann and Curie and Pasteur and Salk and my Dr. Michael and Debbie and herb gardens and bees and sunshine and rain and the loyalty of seed, for helping me be here still, octogenarian on fire
.... to my parents and grandparents and their ancestors for their good genes and their good sense to cross the daunting Atlantic to labor in coal mines and cigar factories to make me, to make me better, to make me a better life
.... to Ben Franklin and Tom Edison and Singer and to my furnace for keeping me warm, and to all the other comforting and safety-making inventions in this shelter where I can close my eyes in sleep unafraid
.... to those who created language out of grunts, and Gutenberg, and my Dad who taught me to read while tending to my sixth-year chickenpox, and to Miss Hanson who liked my third-grade poems, and to those colonials who created Rutgers University without ever having me in mind
.... to a lifetime of listening wonderment for the Mozart melodies that reside in my head, my brain’s personal MP3 downloads
.... to Susan and the other suffragettes who marched and suffered nights in jail for my right to be a woman voting, though they never knew me personally
.... to Ghandi and MLK and Mother Theresa and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Friends and COs and Occupy-all, all those who hold the light
.... to the power of those who loved me and love me still, and by so doing keep me whole still, whether they walk the earth or no longer grace it
.... to whatever mysteries keep my mind alert and capable of outrage, keep my soul alive and capable of gratitude
.... to my diaphragm that keeps me breathing, I know not why
- Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg
