Poem for Thursday and Local Ducklings

The Ear is an Organ Made for Love
By E. Ethelbert Miller

        (for Me-K)

It was the language that left us first.
The Great Migration of words. When people
spoke they punched each other in the mouth.
There was no vocabulary for love. Women
became masculine and could no longer give
birth to warmth or a simple caress with their
lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity
and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities
like fog smothering everything in sight. My
ears begged for camouflage and the chance
to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of
how we sound. Someone said it reminded
them of the time Sonny Rollins disappeared.
People spread stories of how the air would
never be the same or forgive. It was the end
of civilization and nowhere could one hear
the first notes of A Love Supreme. It was as
if John Coltrane had never been born.

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I woke up Thursday morning with an earache that wound up being bad enough that I went to see a doctor. I was pretty sure my anti-earwax drops weren't working, and sure enough, I had an impacted eardrum, which was easy enough to fix though a waste of time on a gorgeous warm day. My ear feels much better inside now but a little sore on the outside from the irrigation jet, so we just walked on the dock instead of going to the beach and I sent a friend a Taylor Swift friendship bracelet so I could be in the right spirit to see her in concert next month. 

We had Trader Joe's veggie pizza for dinner before I chatted with those of my Thursday night chat group not on summer vacation. Then we watched the season finale of Silo, which was satisfying if not all that surprising (I just wanted certain characters possibly back next season), and the new episode of Strange New Worlds (I was sure that character was gay, but I also totally bought that romance, and I liked that overall storyline -- on this show things feel not rehashed or canon-violated but reimagined). My many neighborhood ducklings are growing up: