“Mr. Floyd uttered ‘I can’t breathe’ not a handful of times, as previous videotapes showed, but more than 20 times in all. He cried out not just for his dead mother but for his children too. Before his final breaths, Mr. Floyd gasped: “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me.”

As Mr. Floyd shouted for his life, an officer yelled back at him to ‘stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.’”

~ Excerpt from “New Transcripts Detail Last Moments for George Floyd,” by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Kim Barker, New York Times, July 8, 2020,

The hummingbirds hum around the bee balm. July thrums with buzzing and birdsong. I am up early, on my run with Charlie through damp woods and the horseflies are biting. Charlie is restless while I stretch on the dock and meditate, dropping his tennis ball off the dock for me to retrieve. The pond is glassy under the clouds and I swim around the island before we head home on a walk back home through the woods. I take my time to see the tiny things in grass and on stems in the meadow and along the trail. Today I sit down to write my poem for tomorrow. Open my notes from the writing prompt I sent out on Sunday from the John Logan poem, “Picnic.” I’m pleased with my notes and dig in and go in a surprising process into the poem. It writes itself, quickly. This is the second time, lately, that something I’ve been writing in my heart for decades just comes, fairly effortlessly. It’s an early draft, but I have confidence in it. The house is quieter this week with the youngest gone and her boyfriend. Meals are simpler. We sit on the deck and a breeze blows up on us: my husband, my daughter and me. A thunder storm threatens: it does not come. The evening ends in ice cream.