The Answers Are Still Blowing in the Wind

Today is my daughter's birthday. I wrote this poem while she was in Egypt this winter, watching and listening as best she could given the lack of internet and phones in her desert home, the revolution blossoming in Cairo. I was, at the time, deeply involved in our smaller manifestation of democracy right here in Wisconsin, protesting along with tens of thousands of my fellow citizens the anti-middle class regimen being bulldozed through our state like a grim reaper of small, unimportant people. We faced blizzards. In her world, in Tunisia and Egypt, the winter winds whipped up the desert sands. It was the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fires right here in the USA, one of the sadder moments resulting from the collision of democracy and capitalism.

And now it's her birthday. She is back in the US, starting a doctoral program and grappling with acute culture shock still. Meanwhile, to the immediate west of Egypt, right between it and Tunisia, the rebel fighters in Libya are tonight celebrating the downfall of Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli.

Happy birthday, my darlin' daughter. I love you deeply. Here's your poem:

"Answers in the Wind"
February 1, 2011

Where did this wind, this tumult,

begin? Some say Tunisia. Others

say it began in the exhaled cry

of a hitherto unnoticed

martyr: Shaheed.

                                     A child, but

what did she know, ventured
that it came from a tall dark angel,
smelling distinctly of rosewater. The
internet forecasters,meanwhile,

looking nervously over their

shoulders, pointed their

noticeably stocky forefingers
at the Front Range of the

Rockies like low pressure is

all we are talking about here.

Let's be clear.

                                  We are not

just talking about a snowstorm,
even though the slashing
snow is presently lacerating my

wool coat like the needles

of all those pale and pinch-faced

shirtwaist workers, wielded like

bayonets on New York's Lower

Eastside one hundred years ago.

Long ago.            

                           This wind

goes from my world of ice and
drifting snowdunes and the
monstrous scraping plows barrelling
down the wide avenues with
some tangible sense of superiority to
your world: Sun and sand and stone,

highrises and pyramids and

tanks topped with implacable

soldiers barricading museums full of

our earliest artifacts.

                                           Yes, ours.

Yours and mine. Yours and mine and

yes those of the skinny, hungry,

angry seamstresses on Hester Street
whose relatives are right now
watching Cairo from comfortable
kitchens in Haifa and Tampa, clucking
their tongues and clacking their
knitting needles, saying how
Mubarak wasn't really all that
bad, was he? He kept the peace,

now didn't he?

                                   He was; he didn't

he. He locked the door on the
seamstresses when the Triangle
factory caught fire way back
then, and he still smells like
sulfur when he passes. Let us
hope he passes soon. He blows,
and the sands of the Sinai
slowly cover the bleached bones
of his tenure. He blows, and the
shingles of my old house yearn
and pull at their ancient moorings,

remembering.

                                 In Egypt, my own

daughter waits for the wind to
pass, for the sky to clear.
Here in the snowy north, I
too wait for this violent storm
to subside. But not tonight. This
wind howls like wolves only do
when starving, and I have
nailed up all my heavy blankets
to keep the desert sand from

drifting in my doorway.

                                            Across the

wide world, Hope, my white dove
in the distant Sinai, tucks her

head under a sprouting wing in

her made-for-the-Arctic downbag,

while beyond the flap of the
fabric door,a circle of all male
Bedouins puff and chortle around
their campfire lighting the side

of Mount Moses.