The Lilith Blog

January 18, 2017 by Laura Bernstein-Machlay

Election-Week Thoughts and Goodbyes

I am a poor lover of the moon/I see it all at once and that’s it/for me and the moon—Leonard Cohen

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Leonard Cohen (Nov 10, 2016)

Who thought this news, brutal though it is, would so surprise me at this point—what’s another layer of terrible over the terrible, right? But of course it does. So I’m shocked and shattered yet again. I’d already been moaning his Everybody Knows at the back of my throat, since I grasped what we as a nation had done—what we’d undone—in our most recent election. Since I had to admit that others, so very many others, greeted the same results with glee, and how that baffles me to the marrow of my bones. So I went on humming to distract myself which didn’t really work, an endless loop of everybody’s talking to their pockets, everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long stemmed rose. Then this morning, the NPR report, the perfunctory statement delivered in mournful tones. 

You heard? asks Husband-Steven from his perch on the couch.