Above Ground

by Clint Smith

But some days, I worry that we are welcoming you into the flames of a world that is burning. Some days, I am afraid that I am more kindling than water.

Please, dear reader, do not say that I am hopeless. I believe there is a better future to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left standing after the war has ended. Some of us have become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

Your National Anthem Today, a Black man who was once a Black boy like you got down on one of his knees and laid his helmet on the grass as this country sang its ode to the promise it never kept and the woman in the grocery store line in front of us is on the phone and she is telling someone on the other line that this Black man who was once a Black boy like you should be grateful we live in a country where people aren’t killed for things like this you know, she says, in some places they would hang you for such a blatant act of disrespect, maybe he should go live there instead of here so he can appreciate what he has then she turns around and sees you sitting in the grocery cart surrounded by lettuce and yogurt and frozen chicken thighs and you smile at her with your toothless-gum-smile and she says that you are the cutest baby she has ever seen and tells me how I must feel so lucky to have such a beautiful baby boy and I thank her for her kind words even though I know I should not thank her, because I know that you will not always be a Black boy but one day you may be a Black man and you may decide your country hasn’t kept its promise to you either and this woman, or another like her, will forget you were ever this boy and they will make you into something else and tell you to be grateful for what you’ve been given.

Yesterday, a boat—carrying too many—capsized at sea on its way to new land. Yesterday, there were children in cages at the border stripped from the arms of their parents as they slept at night.

Someone gave me a passport and called it home. I was born onto a sheet of paper and became a citizen of a lie.

The soft hum of history spins on its tilted axis. A cavalcade of ghost ships wash their hands of all they carried.

Counterfactuals are a bed of thorns in a room with nowhere else to lay your head. I imagine what could have been but never was.

but when you look up I am still there, and my arms are still open like a universe in need of a planet to make it worth something.

Your maternal great-grandmother’s voice was the shade under an oak tree and her laugh was the branch that stretched down to let you climb it. Your paternal great-grandfather was a fist full of embers that never burned the ones he loved.

His face became a lake after an oil spill silent empty waiting for someone to clean up the mess, and see if anything beneath the surface had survived.

All these years later, I still can’t tell the difference between a memory and grief’s imagination.

I’m doing a good job it’s just I am praised for the sorts of things no one ever thanks my wife for. I am adorned in a garland of gold stars for simply being in this body.

For weeks, we can’t go outside without the cicadas’ song wrapping itself around the three of us like a quilt. The tree in our front yard has become their sanctuary, a place where they all seem to congregate and sing their first and final songs. We get closer, and see the way their exoskeletons ornament the bark like golden ghosts, shadows abandoned by their bodies searching for new life. One of you is four years old. One of you is two. The next time the cicadas rise out of the earth you will be twenty-one and nineteen. I think of how much might change between these cycles. How much of our planet will still be intact? What sort of societies will the cicadas return to when they next make their way up from the earth?

Maybe treasure is in what dies almost as quickly as it rises from the earth. Maybe treasure is anything that reminds you what a miracle it is to be alive.

Look at the fish swimming under its silver surface. Look how the surface shimmers like sound. Look how the fish follow one another, how their bodies bend like strings of a harp. Look how this stone skips staccato across the surface then disappears with a whisper. Look how the ripples in the water never seem to stop. Look at the way the colors of the fish’s scales change as the sun slides across the sky. Look at the way the plants surround the pond as if they were trying to keep it safe. One day this pond will become a swamp and this swamp will become a marsh and this marsh will become a forest. Maybe one day my children’s children’s children will walk around in this forest and find the stone we skipped. A single fish can lay over one million eggs in a single year. Tiny plankton in bodies of water like this one produce over half of the oxygen on earth. My life is made possible by trillions of tiny mysteries. I exist because of so many things I’ll never see.