Violence

 
No matter who is at fault because someone is going to be blamed whether it's the police department or the victim my heart breaks for the loss of another Black male. Here is another family prematurely broken apart with a gun or guns involved. I wanted to write about the Louisiana incident. I tried to find a poem to fit my feelings for the family. However, I found nothing except the place I like to go in times of pain, the ocean. Lo and behold, I found Sylvia Plath there too.

The Rabbit Catcher

 It was a place of force—
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown...hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

Then, another poem  by Sylvia Plath spoke to me. The title of the poem bumped me all the way back to the Fifties. From someone or from many and somewhere I read the words of Thalidomide. wiki/Thalidomide In a new and awful and unexpected way it brought its form of anguish in the world. Babies, mothers, fathers, families were destroyed in a uniquely different way. I can not find the common denominator here. I have no fancy way to connect yesterday's pain and the pain of yesteryears, I just know all of this morning's words have connected me to the mysteries of life without me screaming why.

I suppose hurt is a string, a yo-yo. It's stretched out, pulled back and stretched out again. I don't understand it. It's like a shadow. I can only pray for a world free of dastardly mistakes and the destruction of innocence, a world where glass no longer cracks.

All night I carpenter
A space for the thing I am given,
A love
Of two wet eyes and a screech.
White spit
Of indifference!
The glass cracks across,
The image
Flees and aborts like dropped mercury















Thalidomide sold under the brand names Immunoprin, among others, is an immunomodulatory drug and the prototype of the thalidomide class of drugs. Today, thalidomide is used mainly as a treatment of certain cancers (multiple myeloma) and of a complication of leprosy.
Thalidomide was first marketed in 1957 in West Germany under the trade-name Contergan. The German drug company Chemie Grünenthal developed and sold the drug. Primarily prescribed as a sedative or hypnotic, thalidomide also claimed to cure "anxiety, insomnia, gastritis, and tension".^[3] Afterwards, it was used against nausea and to alleviate morning sickness in pregnant women. Thalidomide became an over-the-counter drug in West Germany on October 1, 1957. Shortly after the drug was sold in West Germany, between 5,000 and 7,000 infants were born with phocomelia (malformation of the limbs). Only 40% of these children survived.^[4] Throughout the world, about 10,000 cases were reported of infants with phocomelia due to thalidomide; only 50% of the 10,000 survived. Those subjected to thalidomide while in the womb experienced limb deficiencies in a way that the long limbs either were not developed or presented themselves as stumps. Other effects included deformed eyes and hearts, deformed alimentary and urinary tracts, blindness and deafness.^[5] The negative effects of thalidomide led to the development of more structured drug regulations and control over drug use and development.^[6]