In Honor of the Men at the End of a Long Winter

My response to a sister-friend's spring writing prompt: "in honor of the men."

Bless the men. Every man. Bless us in the springtime of our emergence. Have we made it to the spring? Is that where we really are? Are we the crocuses sprouting up after the long, dark winter? The cold winter? The bloody, bleak, brutal winter of ages past?

Bless the men, for what we have endured. For what we are surviving. For what we’ve done. Oh God, what have we done? Bless us. Bless what we don’t know, what we haven’t figured out, what we dare not risk. Bless what we think we know and what we think you need to know, and what we desperately without even knowing it want you to know but don’t know how to tell you. Bless what we do know, what we’ve earned, learned by terrible trial and catastrophic error, generation after generation after generation.

Have we learned? What are we learning?

Bless the harm we’ve caused over the course of this long winter, what we haven’t had the courage to listen to, what we haven’t ventured to feel. Bless those who feel the consequences of our unfeeling. Bless the women. The grandmothers who carry us. The mothers who nurse us. The sisters who believe in us even when we give them so many reasons not to. Bless those who walk between, and on the margins, those who cross over, those we haven’t understood, who frighten us deeper into our beloved binary of black and white, shadow and light. Bless our every shadow, and bless our light. Bless this holy night.

Is that a light I see? Are we emerging from the darkness at last? What if spring really has come? What if we really are the crocuses? 

Bless the harm we’ve caused, yes, but bless also the harm we’ve experienced in the tender tissue of our minds, the sacred chambers of our enfortressed hearts. Who dare approach the fortress of a man? What are we protecting? Who’s behind the spiked gates, the catapults and the kettles of hot oil and the barbed rain of arrows? Wouldn’t you like to know. Would you? Would anyone? Who wants to know the truth about men? Who cares? Who really, actually cares? And how can we possibly trust anyone who says they do, given what we come from? We come from the winter, and the winter has been hard. It will take some time to thaw, to open again, or for the first time.

Think of the winter. Think of the war. Think of the billions of boys born into that ancient battle with their own humanity, just following orders: to fight against their nature as vulnerable and delicate and temporary and sensitive, vulnerable as the crocuses are vulnerable, delicate and temporary and sensitive as any flower.

What is the flower of a man, the power of a man flowering? What is it, for a man to blossom? What does it take for a crocus to break the surface of the soil and open to the light of the sun?

Think of the fathers, the billions of fathers, and of what they never knew, were never allowed to know, about themselves, about their sons, the petals that never did unfurl. Couldn’t unfurl. Wouldn’t even dream of unfurling. Think of them, the ones who came before us, turned under like last year’s compost into the soil of this evolution, this revolution of men. Think of them. The indigenous fathers turned under. The Black fathers turned under. The brown fathers turned under. And yes, the white fathers turned under, too. All of them, babes once, boys once, oh God, all the babes and the boys turned under. Bless them, the soil of our ancestors, those from whom we now emerge.

Bless this emergence. Bless this emergency. Bless the unbearable vulnerability of our longing to be loved.

My dad never heard his dad say I love you. Not once. “Your father loves you, you know,” his mother would say to him. Bless him, my father, who says I love you every time we talk. And bless my grandfather, my father’s father, the winter he endured. Thank you, Grandpa, for being the one to weather that cold, that dark. I’m glad it wasn’t me. By the time it got to me, things had warmed up a bit. I get cold sometimes, sure, and I go dark sometimes, sure, but not like that, like whatever was going on behind that newspaper you hid behind, that fortress you stayed inside. I’m sorry it had to be you. I will blossom for you, Grandpa, blossom as bravely as I can.

Bless my mother’s father, too, while I’m at it, who loved his pack of children, who struck his eldest son sometimes (with a belt? with his fists?), who sobbed at the front door the night his eldest son came home from Vietnam, who made those same sounds the night he lay dying in his bed a few years later. Heart attack. 57 years old. Bless his heart, and mine, and the heart of every man.

Bless bell hooks, for what she went through to earn the right to observe: “Patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

Would you like to have a man’s heart? Beating in your own chest? You who know what it is to be sensitive, you who treasure your un-mutilated capacity to feel, you who rely without even realizing it on your ability to emote and to share and to open and to receive, to blossom, you who cherish and embrace the truth of your vulnerability, whoever you are, if you’re out there: imagine if all of that was forbidden to you. Imagine your way there, here, to us, to this darkness we’ve somehow for some reason had to stay in for so long, this long winter, this long war.

See the little babe of my father, perfect, gorgeous, just one with the universe. Then see him as a little boy, innocent and unaware of what’s happening and not happening. Then see him in that moment when he is a young man suddenly realizing he has never heard those words from his dad, and then watch as he realizes he never will. Keep watching as he convinces himself it’s not that big of a deal. Think of my maternal grandfather striking my uncle, his eldest son. Think of my uncle in Vietnam. Think of Al Miller, my neighbor, who fought in Vietnam, too, who killed five men, and was shot on his 21^st birthday, and saw the boys he was assigned to protect blown to smithereens. Think of that war, inside. That winter.

Bless the winter, bless the war, bless this spring armistice that might be here at last.

Is that a songbird I just heard outside? And what is that sound coming from the mud? Not the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying…Peepers! My God, bless the peepers. I forgot about them. What else have I forgotten?

Bless my grandsons. Bless what they will never have to know, as I never had to know what my grandfathers had to know, the hits they had to take, the shock they had to absorb from the hits their fathers took. Who will they be, my grandsons? What buds will break in the fortress of their hearts and unfurl into the world? If we now are the crocuses, what sunflowers our grandsons will be.