this being how I sing/so sing

They’ve been asking, over and over again. They’ve been asking, in different ways, what’s the difference between resignation and surrender? Where does resignation end and surrender begin? I think you deserve a better question. What difference does it make?

What I am trying to say is that I am afraid, most of the time, to let go. I hover in the space between giving up and giving over, holding tight. Winter isn’t over yet, not in this hemisphere. Too many names. The brass band gathers at the site of so many murders. They sing and play the dead across the river.1 They play at night.

Another question they’ve been asking, over and over, James Baldwin’s question. What will happen to all that beauty? The story is called All That’s Left of You.2 At one point, an Israeli hospital employee asks Palestinian parents if they want to donate their braindead son’s organs. How is this question possible? I won’t tell you how they answer. I suspect my entitlement is just as belligerent, saturated, as it so often is, with the desperation we all share.

I thought I’d better find my own words, but none of them belong to me, I only keep company with them for a short time. The English I know is so oriented toward counting what is not countable. Now it has been 864 days since October 7, 2023; over 28,000 days since 1948. Who’s counting? How many days since Europeans arrived in what we now call Minneapolis, since that catastrophe? Yesterday is when I learned that nakba means ‘catasotrophe’ in Arabic.

From a simultaneous season, SJ Norman writes, “It is a quiet thing to hold a seed. It is the 196th day of a genocide, and maybe the work of world-building is, and should be, entirely quotidian, the same as: watering plants, folding linens, feeding people and animals. The same as brushing the knots gently from a child’s hair: an action performed with tender and ordinary persistence.”3

In the world Susan Raffo builds, and welcomes us into, “There is a net and it has always been here, it is always here, it's just that sometimes it's hard to see and all that is happening in Minneapolis is that some of the confusion is fading and what is visible is the link and weave and stumble and steady between us. May we keep repairing it as it frays, from those outside and from the rising tension we hold within and may this net grow with wisdom and may bodies tired of holding themselves up alone someday feel like they can relax into the steady certainty of something much bigger than the size of their skin.”4

To be alive, to be reachable—imprinted by these testimonies, tearful. The difference between resignation and surrender: how we say fuck it and mean I’m done and say fuck it and mean alright, I’ve gotta give it my all this time.