masks

Mask poem

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

The July Open Write on Ethical ELA begins today with host Mo Daley, who invites poets to “Consider the masks you or those around you might wear. Using a format of your choosing, write a poem about a mask or masks.”

My first thought in response, with masks being linked to ancient theatrical performances, was writing around Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”

But then a little creature appeared in my head and ran the rest of it away.

Which may be for the best…

Mask Obscura

Raccoon was named
for the way it uses
its “hands”

rubbing and rinsing
its food
in water

not for the mask
forever typecasting Raccoon
as bandit-trickster
in human lore.

Unlike humans
these creatures know one another
by their individual masks

not donned as shields
or ritual
or protocol
or festivity
or theatrics
or deeds of darkness

but serving to
absorb light
in the night

to see

to survive.

Yet like humans
Raccoon covets shiny things

and can be trapped by them.

Hunters of yore
eventually learned
to cut holes in logs
to place a bit of tin inside
to hammer in nails
around the small circumference

knowing Raccoon
would be beguiled
would reach its hand inside
for the bright thing.

Once the fist is clenched
the creature will never let go
to set itself free…

in paradoxical symmetry
so does the creature
that named itself 
for its supreme intelligence.

Might it have been better named
for its own myriad masks
and motives, ever disguised?
Or for the hubris and folly
accounting for so much of its
own demise?

If only Raccoon
had the ability
to write,
there might be annals
of Ring-Tales
read aloud in the night
at a gathering deep in the forest
by crackling firelight:

To see or not to see*…
Lord, what ultimate Tricksters
these Homo sapiens be!
 
There in that circle, perhaps
with shivery spines
and whiskers a-tremble
they name us
not for our deeds or dominion
but for the way
we wash our hands.

—
*Note: The collective noun for raccoons is a gaze.

Procyon lotor (raccoon).jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Procyon lotor is derived from Latin for “washer”

March 13th

/ Fran Haley / 34 Comments

Friday the 13th of March, 2020, when school dismissed,
we had no idea we wouldn’t be returning.

Not to the building.

Not to life as we knew it.

Not to teaching as we knew it.

We left mountains of work undone behind us.

We faced mountains looming before us, the likes of which we’d never seen.

A mountain of my masks

In the maelstrom of so much change, we learned.

We learned we could.

We learned that some things, the important things,
never change.

Message from a student on my link

Saturday the 13th of March, 2021: Most of us have had our first vaccination and are getting the second.

We are preparing for all students to return to campus
on Monday,
except the children of parents who have opted
to keep them virtual until June.

Last March 13th, we thought it would only be for a week.
Maybe two.

It’s been exactly one year.

Today, March 13th, let us celebrate:

We did enough.

We had enough.

We were enough.

We are enough.

It is enough, knowing our why.

The children. Always our why.

Just sayin’. This was shared via text among my colleagues.

*******

The annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers is underway, meaning that I am posting every day in the month of March. This marks my fifth consecutive year and I’m experimenting with an abecedarian approach: On Day 13, I am writing around a word beginning with letter m. Just so happens to coincide with the anniversary.

Masked

/ Fran Haley / 13 Comments

This week, Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog invites writing about masks we’ve encountered or worn, literal or figurative, maybe one from long ago…

Winter morning. In my pajamas on the cold kitchen floor, Onyx and Bagel jumping on me with joy. Half-dachshunds, brothers who look nothing alike. Onyx, black and tan (muddled markings; his whole head is tan) is the stronger of the two. A combination of rubber ball and coiled spring, he can jump high enough to give me a kiss even when I’m standing—if I lean over just a little. It’s a feat; at thirteen I’m growing tall. Bagel, long-haired, red piebald, snowy white chest, coloring that reminds me of Lassie, is the happiest dog on Earth except for when it thunders and he runs to hide behind the commode. My sister sits by the wall on top of the vent, her skinny eleven-year-old body drawn into a tight ball, pajama bottoms ballooning and fluttering in the rush of heated air. She doesn’t want to be up, doesn’t want to go to school, is too grumpy for more than a furtive dog-greeting. She’ll play when she’s ready. I embrace the wriggling, wagging, warm bodies, giggling, when I hear footsteps in the hall…Daddy’s familiar stride on the hardwood, in shoes that he polishes every night with a tin and stained cloth until the glossy surfaces reflect like black mirrors…

Suddenly the dogs shoot to the gate (or what we call the gate: a gray particleboard once used under a twin bed mattress when Mama was recovering from back surgery, we slide it back and forth) in the wide kitchen doorway. Barking, ferocious; I have never heard them—or any dog—make such violent noise. They charge the gate, lunging, sounding ready to attack…

There stands Daddy. His face is gone. Instead, there’s huge, opaque goggle-eyes, a distorted nose, pulled and hanging, elephant-like, no sign of human skin or hair; olive-gray visage, that of an ominous specter…

He’s wearing a gas mask.

I had never heard of a strike, picket lines, or unions before. I couldn’t understand why someone would be called a scab for going to work but it did make sense that people who protect said scabs would be scathingly called “Band-Aids”… I knew police were involved, somehow, but the picture in my mind was as muddled as Onyx’s markings, without defining details.

My father wore the same uniform as police but he wasn’t an officer. He was a company security guard. A protector of the gates. Duty-minded. Responsible. The parent who got up with me at night when I had asthma attacks, who would later co-sign my first college loan with the stern admonishment that I’d better pay it back because he couldn’t (I did).

He would die in uniform, but not for many more years, in an attack waged by his own heart, myocardial infarction, three days before retiring, while on his way to work.

The dogs are going crazy. I stare at the mask and the only word that comes to mind is ‘monster’— it isn’t right, it isn’t right, that such things should have to exist because of what people do to each other, that Daddy should need this macabre (newly-learned word) apparatus for his own protection—he removes it. He doesn’t mean to scare. “Gracious,” he says to Onyx and Bagel, chuckling, “what fierce watchdogs.” They cease barking and resume wagging the second his human face is restored. They return, pressing their little bodies against me. I can feel them trembling.

Or maybe that’s me, as Daddy goes about preparing for another day.

Lead photo: Insights Unspoken. CC BY-SA

*******

History, as we know, repeats itself in infinite ways. I inadvertently stumbled into this historical gas mask hall of horrors…or maybe it’s a hall of mirrors…

Checking rubber faces for gas masks. State Library of Victoria Collection, circa 1941. CC BY

Soldier and horse. Reeve17408. CC BY

I’ve joined an open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join us.