Recently, I felt a rictus of unbelief, the feeling when, perhaps due to a misunderstanding, an ally mistakes you as an enemy and, recalcitrant, they remain entrenched. At first, I was saddened by the loss. Then I remembered what really matters. It is the minutes and hours I spend with my kids and my wife, hours and minutes that make up the days and years, forming bonds of love that last more than a lifetime, generations. I am the father of one daughter and five boys. I believe the work of undoing centuries of male chauvinism is done at home: it begins with the education of our children, by our own example.
Sometimes, I just smile in appreciation of some moment, a conversation with my teenage daughter about school, playing with number and letter blocks with our little ones, helping my teenage sons with their music. I take stock of these abiding reminders of what really matters.
Below is the poem by Rosario Curiel:
Loving the Rictus
I’ve witnessed the birth of the Last Humansagreed in word with the Cry of the Wind,
clinging to the rupture of the last questions
because
for a long time, they’ve forgotten the last answers.
I’ve seen what is constructed by worn hands,
the fleeing in the street of the battalions of pain,the crackle of the bones of the instants in which we
believed ourselves gods.
We create gods. We want them to respond to us,
but reasons never come down from the empty sky.
I have lived beyond myself.
Also, from you.Because in this we go together:
when you cry, I think of giving you my hand
and believing in the beings that I believe.
Those that,
even living huddled behind the door,
tearing off the skin of their fingers in strips,
they know that
if you bleed, we all bleed
and if you laugh
-ah, if you laugh-
then you have discovered that,
behind the rictus of the lost days,
there are endless flowers spread at your feet
so that you don’t get rid
of that part of you that’s not beautiful like a pink dawn
but
rather
something that’s cooked in the vapor of the breath
of the bitter hours.
