waiting for grief counseling to begin
To List the Woes
- my daughter was murdered
- my friend is dying
- my country tis of thee no longer about liberty
- murder
- justice and lack thereof
- Nicholas Rini and why i want to call him, or better yet, just STAND in front of him.
- my windshield broke
- i have high blood pressure
- my...i will save the last one for privacy's sake.
- losing trust

....

If I stop in the art store and buy
One peacock blue, one coffee brown,
Does that mean I need to paint
A field and a sky?

I take it as a yes, and say,
Bekah leads me to art so I
Must make what my hands say
She tells me to. Okay.

So across the wet paper flows
Peacock blue, a sky, tobacco
Brown, a field in Autumn.
Then I'm cuddly warm. She knows.

What she makes me know.
There is Art in doing and being.
In sleep canvases with plots
Roll before me, a movie slow.

Though it could be a nightmare,
It could be sweet, it is in color,
And even when she is never seen,
Bekah is always there.

I might feel afraid or feel brave,
People die or are threatened film
Noir style; saved like geese in the movies,
In the morning I am the saved.

So I paint. I scribble. I am
an artist today, a poet, a novelist.
I am an advocate, a protester, a grandmother,
I am, I am Pop-eye, I am.

....

think that one either needs much work or to be mercifully abandoned...but it set me on a train of thought. connected. Jung why did you have to hate jews? i know there will be no good answer, because my children were/are jews and all my reasons have to do with love.

but maybe anti-semitism is not a good reason not to study jung. i still read ezra pound, a fascist. in a station of the metro...but i will not study hitler.

...

and my counselor walked up, said, "Ready!" so i followed him into the place, sat on the couch and raved for an hour or so. he said jung was indoctrinated before he became brilliant. this is still problematic for me, because i grew up in torrance, ca, a very racist place to grow up, and by the age of 10 at most and maybe even 5 i was a bleeding heart. i don't even claim to be brilliant [only nearly so - wink]. how did i get to be this-a-way?

eh. flood flood flood. if the governor of CA could be recalled because of the dirty tricks of the rich white men who ran enron and the country, can't gw bush be recalled for killing the young men and women who are our children/grandchildren/future, etcetera? the etcetera representing all the other unnecessarily dead.

switch gears: it pisses me off no end that i cannot find the news story anywhere on the web. also seems unbelievable, since i heard it on the radio...at any rate. that was monday and this is wednesday but by tuesday apparently it had been buried really, really well. there is a pop star by the name of justin timberlake, right? and he was on a radio show - last year i believe - and a fan, a young woman named Ann White, who was two days away from her 22nd birthday, was run over, dragged about a block, and dumped by a mad man in a car. he was charged with murder and allowed to plead no contest to approximately the same felony Rambo [the woman who murdered my daughter 13 days after her 21st birthday in much the same manner] pled no contest to.

he got 18 years. by plea bargain. EIGHTEEN YEARS - something resembling a reasonable prison sentence for what he did. rambo got 4 years. FOUR YEARS - something that is exactly a travesty of justice.

the radio station said something about the young woman - about her college, or something she had just achieved. mentioned that in two more days she would be 22. well, i can do that. bekah had celebrated her 21st birthday 13 days before she was killed, and when she was awarded an honorary posthumous diploma from brooks college, where she had just started her last year, her department head said that she would have been a valecdictorian candidate.

please understand, i am GLAD he got that much time. what i'm saying is rambo getting out of prison next february is SO FUCKING WRONG! bekah. bekah was not chopped liver.

i'll say it however many times it is appropriate. my daughter was not and will never be chopped liver, and her loss is a great, great loss.
- posted by barbara @ 11/05/2003 01:39:00 PM