Dust Gets in Your Eye - Sept 21 2026

 

Dust Gets in Your Eye

Sept 21 2026

I rarely cry.

Sure, dust gets in your eye

allergy season.

But the kind that doesn’t stop?

When you can’t breathe,

gulping air

as if drowning

in warm salty tears?

When snot runs out your nose

and into your mouth,

spluttering and choking

and not caring how it looks?

When your face is clenched in misery

body wracked with sobs,

frown lines locked

as if they’ll harden there?

It can feel cathartic,

but you can also feel

unworthy of such grief.

It can bring you closer;

or leave you feeling alone

to be so deeply touched

by something so small.

Small, because that was the last brake left 

holding the floodgates closed.

When the dam

that all those years kept you in control

let go,

and the stoical man

who struck others as guarded and cold

broke down

   . . . showing, for once

real emotion.

They say only humans cry for no reason.

Who knows why evolution

has made us weep.

Is it to bring us together?

Because we know too much?

Or because words 

are sometimes not enough?

It was nothing, really.

No one died

no child suffered,

nothing was lost.

But still, I cried, bawled, sobbed.

Perhaps next time

it will take more

then come more easily.

When I won’t pretend 

there’s something in my eye,

won’t turn away

hide the tears 

or wipe them furtively off.

My beautiful dog Rufus is still strong and healthy in her 11th year. But the signs of age are there. And since the average lifespan of her breed is 10.7 years, I increasingly feel the anticipatory grief of her inevitable death.

So I identified with this story. Especially the opening line of the subheading: I rarely cry. And then identified with what might seem to some the exorbitant grief at the death of an animal — even a beloved one. That is, the some who do not understand this kind of love, thinking that only our fellow humans are worthy of it.

In the poem, it’s something minor that opens the floodgates: all the pent up emotion of a stoical person who doesn’t cry, and the unfamiliar feeling of simply giving in to it.

Evolution doesn’t favour a trait for no reason. So I think humans cry emotional tears because it allows us to grieve together and strengthen community: a form of communication that doesn’t need language. As social animals who depend on each other for survival, little is more important than strong social bonds and tribal solidarity. 

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