Margotlog: The Art of Losing

Margotlog: The Art of Losing

Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle, "The Art of Losing" has the command and sheen of great art. It's been one of my favorites for a very long time. Now I think of it after a day of losing first one, then another, then yet another crucial item: my car keys, my bigger cell phone, and almost my mind.

     The art of losing isn't hard to master
     so many things seem filled with the intent
     to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Losing and searching can become an obsession of flitting here, then there. Will the cell phone be hiding in the depths of my purse? Did I put it on the dining room floor as I ate dinner last night?


     Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
     of lost door keys, the hour badly spend.
     The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I call my very put-together friend whose house is just beyond the Ford Bridge i.e. just inside Minneapolis. "Mary," I say with a touch of hysteria in my voice, "I can't seem to find your house. Some nice man with a dress shop pointed me back to the Parkway, but now the numbers on 35th Avenue are totally off, far beyond yours!"

     ....I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster,
     some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
     I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

Plucking up my courage, still unable to find my cell phone. I take a discarded old phone to AT&T where a charming young man sets is up to work again with a new "sym" card. Now it's chirping as it powers up. But will I be able to turn it off once on the plane to Amherst? So far, that hasn't worked. It chirps, and chirps, and chirps.


     practice losing farther, losing faster:
     places, and names, and where it was you meant
     to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

Tomorrow in the dark before dawn, I will fly to visit this dear friend, younger than I am by at least a decade. Seven months ago, his partner of many years died of a cancer that could no longer be kept at bay. "I still weep every day," he tells me on the phone. Now as I turn myself toward the east, I sorrow for the one who is lost, joy for his life we both loved, though in vastly different intensites.

  --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
     I love), I shan't have lied. It's evident
     the art of losing's not too hard to master
     though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Margotlog: Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Be Free

Margotlog: "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Be Free"

The photo on the front page of the StarTribune 6/16/18 shows a boy, around six, staring up at an adult in combat garb toting a night-stick and hand gun. Behind the boy stands another adult wearing a red t-shirt, worn jeans, and running shoes.

How is it possible that the United States, home of immigrants from around the world, has begun in a big way, the separation of immigrant children from their parents? In 1900, my Italian grandmother, newly arrived in New York from Sicily. Her husband had served in the Italiay army and been sent to the North where he converted to Protestantism. When he returned to their tiny town in northern Sicily and built a small church for a very small congregation, Catholic townpeople burned it. He rebuilt, but the townpeople burned the second church. Fearing for their lives, the family came to New York. There Rose who would become my grandmother became so concerned for the hungry children and poorly clad women around her in the New York tenements that she delivered food, warm clothing, and blankets to residents three flights up. She soon collapsed and died.

Doing good for those in need is surely at the heart of every religious tradition on earth—that is, except for the Trump administration. Trump & Company have ordered thousands of children to be separated from their parents who’ve illegally crossed the U.S./Mexican border.

This U.S. policy smacks of Nazism, separating the “outsiders” from the clean, upright insiders, making those different from ourselves suffer. The thought of these thousands of children deprived of their parents and put in “holding pens” fills me with horror and dread. Congress needs to pass laws forbidding such heartless treatment of the friendless and powerless. It’s time those of us who are not Native American remembered that our ancestors also strove to enter this country, often poor and friendless. It is time we all remembered Emma Lazarus' poem on the Statue of Liberty: 

 "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-[tossed] to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Let us be the lamp of hope, as we offer freedom from want, charity toward all, and acceptance among us.