My Son's Chants

I'm holding my seven-month old by his hands so that he’s standing and he chants like a shaman using long syllables and song-like intonations that call down energy and power and he makes the sun set and the evening colors in the sky spread across the land and alight on the still snow-capped mountains. They turn pink like the salmon-colored roses blooming in his mother's garden but my mind can’t rest here in this pink land under a darkening violet sunset because the power behind my son’s sudden chants haunt me call up all my thoughts of the day and play them in the front of my mind like a dramatic movie and I think we say yes too easily, sounds absurd to even admit this, but yes, we say yes to anything that gives us meaning, something we can cheer about, anything that gives us the upper-hand the extra paycheck in the bank. The ten o’clock evening news starts and tragedy tops the hour each story after story the anchors sit with these stoic and sad masks reading queue cards about murder, war, missing children, court cases and car accidents but they take them off just in time for commercial breaks and just in time for the sports and the weather and the final "goodnight" segment so that the entire world seems set to right I assume so that not one soul not one state senator retires to bed suffering from heartburn from a pricked conscience while thousands of miles away we continue to say yes to war to murder to death to heartache to fear to abuse to empty promises changing ethics shallow beliefs and time ticks away and it has told us a million times that it can’t bring what has past back to us but we never listen we march into our homes and lock our doors and shut up our windows we pull down our blinds and create makeshift shrines of make believe and I swear as my son chants and sings down my awareness I hear women singing softly as they prepare another body for God.