Butterfly Effect of the Pope's Change of Heart: AIDS, Africa, the world, new hope, Thom Gunn poem

The Pope has finally condoned use of condoms (in "limited" circumstances).

That is both not enough and the most exciting, heartening, lifesaving news I've heard in a long time. How any institution could watch as women and children and men suffer--when that institution could save millions (what, at least twenty million deaths in Africa?) has been disturbing and it's hard to say how the west or the Church can ever make sufficient reparations. But this is a major, huge development. My heart feels anunciated, filled with golden light.

Meterologist Edward Lorenz's theory of a "Butterfly Effect," that small changes in atmospheric physics can have a momentous impact--popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, an examination of how trends begin and spread--sure holds true today.

The Vatican's decision isn't so small. Its effect will be enormous. The fact that a conservative Pope reversed a policy is in itself a model of listening to the heart. We can't raise the dead but at least we can prevent more tragedy.

Here's a poem by Thom Gunn, a memory of friends who died. As I was searching online for relevant work I was unable to find poems by Africans although I'm sure there are many. By International AIDS Day, surely, I'll find some.

The Man with Night Sweats
 I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.

I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead

Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
____
Thom Gunn, http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/109

AIDS: My first to go

I flash in and out on remembering the name of my first friend to die of AIDS. It was over thirty years ago.

Friends gathered—I'm the very least of the "we" here and I'm not being humble—a care committee whose work intensified, of necessity, toward the end. While Sanderson's original life was sometimes aware, sometimes unconscious; had bumps, starts, stops, triumphs, loves, his death was conscious.

It's been over thirty years since he gave me a singular piece of advice. Sarah, let the weather support you. I think of those words often and make it so. Breezes, Humidity, Ice Storms. They are all acts of something greater than me (Nature, the Universe, Goddess, She, the Divine).

This year, 2009, early, maybe February, I hit a new high regarding my awareness of weather (or weather "conditions") and Sanderson's advice. I realized there is to be no complaining. Yes, I know about Katrina and monsoons and Indonesia and the damage. I am not the one to explain the existence of suffering, though on the simplest level, I've had heat rashes since I was a little girl on Long Island. That's one of my earliest memories, being uncomfortable in my skin, and the relation to external weathers.

But day-to-day, which is pretty much all I know any more, I see it all as a gift, so when someone complains about rain or fog or cold or other usual inconveniences of the natural world I can't figure the person out. Don't they know?

Practical

Let me tell you about my friend
Sanderson. Well he’s dead,
but what’re you gonna do — the first ones died
in that Rapture of malfunctioned immunity.
My early dead read histories of women
his last six months.

You know how it is when you stand still in
Spring because a breeze is
teasing the green of light from trees?
Sarah, Sanderson said to me.
I admit I get real emotional. Sarah.
Let the weather support you.

What is it about white people?
A chunk missing here and there.
Don’t run your panties through
a hand-crank wringer.
Delicates need a special cycle and
color is just a metaphor.

In the great Pacific Northwest, sky
is every type of blanket shaken over you
every two hours. Sanderson,
in the way of the dead, goes on retreats
there in the still early stage of whatever-
itisthatcomesnextwhichoughtnottobesuch-
afocusofmine as that here and now, this this,
their perfumed spring, those bills, gunshots,
a certificate of appreciation gotten kinda dusty
in its dime store frame — all enough diverting.

Oh yeah, did I mention?
He also said, I don’t understand
why all the women don’t kill all the men.

So it took years for me to understand why not.
Of course I’m damaged, and needing more from
my icon of grace, on what to allow to support me.

______

Sarah Sarai, first published in Main Street Rag, 2008, and included in The Future Is Happy, 2009