The poem below—“Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden—is one of my all-time favorite poems. I love the passion, the directness, the emphasis on physicality, the confident assurance that someday things will be different—not if but when. I love the way Hayden brings concepts like freedom and liberty down from the abstract into the flesh and blood world. The poem is not about freedom in general but about this freedom, this liberty—a freedom and liberty that are clearly present in the world. But, as the poem beautifully articulates, it is not available to everyone (the poem was written during the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s). I love the weariness of the word “Oh.” I love the description of freedom and liberty being beautiful but also terrible (depending on what we choose to do with our freedom and liberty).

 

Thank you, Robert Hayden, for your exquisite poem!

 

Frederick Douglass

 

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

 

– Robert Hayden (1966)

 

 

Lost Wax

In the basement of my high school—the art teacher’s den—
I learned to carve the shapes of thoughts and prayers
into dark green modeling wax. Shrouded in plaster,
the wax was then burned into a nothingness,
a hollow to be filled with scraps of silver
scrounged from past projects and pawn-shop dregs.

I’ve since lost count of all the schools
shot up, locked down—art slashed out of budgets
too small a thing to miss among so much.
The air is thick with “thoughts and prayers”
empty as those molds I used to fill,
the corridors of power crowded with pawns—
those who have sold their souls for green and silver.

For this month, I am posting a poem in honor and in memory of the woman who was raped and tortured on a bus in New Delhi, India on the night of December 16th, 2012. She was a 23-year-old physiotherapy student who was returning home with a friend after seeing the film Life of Pi. She was referred to in the media as Amanat which is the Urdu word for treasure.

 

Amanat

 

The hyena kills the zebra,

then the orangutan.

 

The tiger kills the hyena.

And the boy survives.

 

Pi is an irrational number.

And a woman boards a bus.

 

If horses could draw,

they would draw one god

 

in the shape of a horse.

Oxen would draw many,

 

each with a body like their own.

And the bus is not really a bus.

 

The relationship

between the width of a circle

 

and its circumference

continues infinitely without

 

repeating. And Pi is a boy

who just wants to love

 

God. If dark matter could draw,

it would not draw itself.

 

The human intestine

is approximately five feet long.

 

Only five percent of hers

would remain. They would be called

 

joyriders. The instrument used was

metal. The instrument used

 

was flesh. And the woman,

it was said, died peacefully.

 

– First published in CALYX, Fall/Winter 2015

 

 

Whereas, Layli Long Soldier, Graywolf Press, 2017

For many U.S. readers, November means Thanksgiving. It is not ironic and entirely intentional that it is also #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth. Most readers don’t know or think about the history of the Thanksgiving holiday, its origin and the events on which it was based. That erasure can blind readers to the hurt the holiday causes as well as to the incorrect and damaging way in which it portrays aboriginal North Americans and continues to reinforce the idea that they live only in the past. That’s part of my reason for posting this review/response at this time; the other reason is because Long Soldier’s poetry is powerful and worth reading, no matter the time of the year.

The organizing principle behind Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas is the structure of legal language. The book’s structure is a moving combination, using the language of the colonizer and, specifically, the language of the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, to demonstrate the injustice done to aboriginal North Americans during the colonization and existence of the United States of America.

The first section of the book, titled “These Being the Considerations”, is filled with heart-breakingly beautiful poems describing Long Soldier’s nation’s language and geography. The poems include Lakota words; the poems both explain the meanings of and incorporate an existing understanding of these words. I am grateful to Long Soldier for sharing bits of the Lakota language, from words as universal as those to describe loss and those whose meaning is re-used to mean coffee. To me, it’s a vibrant way to make the people in her poems three-dimensional.

The final, titular, section of the book gets into the meat of the Apology, using its words, turning and evolving them, to see what they really say. Each of these poems ends with a semicolon, adding to the sense of legalese. The majority of the poems also contrast the legal language with what appear to me to be memoir/anecdotes from Long Soldier’s life.

Long Soldier’s poems use a great many concrete devices: they sprawl across the page, they right-justify, they build boxes, they mirror, they line-break in the middle of words.

What strikes me, in my ignorance and inexperience with the use of language to break down language, is how deft a writer Long Soldier is. While she clearly expresses the need to use the colonizer’s language against them, she is also clearly not one to do that without first infiltrating that language and becoming an expert in it.

Excerpts from Whereas are available online at Poetry magazine and Graywolf Press.

I was given a pumpkin last month just before Halloween, and lacked time for taking a proper stab at it, so I grabbed some markers and scrawled Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind” across it (and sketched a semblance of Anne’s face on one side).

A few days later, said pumpkin started leaking while in my kitchen, so we hurried it outside. A day or two later, I spotted squirrels doing their thing…

What I find far, far more obscene than local rodents romping with Miss Sexton O’Lantern is the behavior of various so-called public servants. Which is what led to this coming out of yesterday’s exercising:

That Kind

(after Anne Sexton)

I have gone out, whom they call bitch,
haunted by headlines, braver when I write
than when I dream, where with the hitch
that plagues my breath when awake I bite
down fire-curled curses, tame my mind
and modulate my voice to just above quiet.
I have been that kind.

I have found within old pockets of mourning
mustards hard as mortar, mayo soft as silk
and masking like poisons—like how milk
need not stink nor supply some other warning
before it brings a houseful to their knees.
I have buried shame amid indifferent trees.
I have been that kind.

I have been Cassandra, my screeching
marking not one slat of prideful walls
that keep no danger out. No beseeching
of gods will save us from the squalls
that care not who’s been good or who meant well:
the storms will scour us all from here to hell.
I have been that kind.

As we enter the holiday season, here are 10 reasons to pre-order Mosaic of the Dark, my first full-length book of poetry!

• It’s a beautiful book. Really. But don’t just take my word for it. My mother-in-law, Sherry Samuels, says so too. She would know—she’s a former English teacher. 😊

• It received a starred review in Kirkus! Click here to read the full review.

• It’s better for the publisher to pre-order. Don’t you want to do your part to help small, independent poetry presses thrive???

• The more copies I sell during the pre-order phase, the slightly less broke I will be after my book tour. Chicago, Austin, Pittsburgh, Knoxville, San Francisco, New York, here I come!

• The more copies I sell, the more exposure my sister-in-law, Jill Samuels, will get for her beautiful artwork.

• For any order placed by 12/31/17, a portion of the proceeds will go to the Tennessee Equality Project to support the good work they do on behalf of LGBTQ folks in TN. The Tennessee legislature spends a lot of time thinking up ways to marginalize us. Think how much good you can do by buying my book!

• If I reach my target number by Dec 31, I am going to treat myself to a six-pack of blackberry La Croix.

• The book will not be released until January but if you want to order the book to give as a gift before then, let me know (by Dec 15^th) and I can send a nice card to the recipient. Hey, it’s something.

• It’s the right thing to do. Trust me. 🙂

• Have I mentioned how much I love La Croix???

To order, click here!

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, in part because of a recent, unexpected death in my spouse’s family. In part, because the days are getting shorter. And, in part, because we are approaching that time of year when, in some cultures, the “veil” between the dead and the living is thought to be at its thinnest.

I don’t know what happens to us when we die or where our loved ones go but I do know that sometimes, as a poet, I feel “haunted” by people who are no longer living. Sometimes I feel haunted by historical figures–people from the past who I suddenly want to learn more about. In my poem “Even Houseflies,” for example, I reference Pliny the Elder who was a 1^st century Roman Historian and Otzi the Iceman whose 5,000-year-old body was found in the Alps over two decades ago.

Other times I am haunted by family members–by my mother, in particular. My mother died in 2001, largely from the effects of alcoholism, and just when I think I’ve written the last poem about her, another one comes along. Although many of my mother poems emerge from a place of pain and loss, I consider these hauntings to be a wonderful gift; a way for me to connect, through my writing, with one of my dearest ancestors.

I am sharing two poems below: “Last Poem about My Mother” (which is definitely not the last poem about my mother) and “Even Houseflies” which references both kinds of hauntings–the personal kind and the historical kind.

 

Last Poem about My Mother

 

This is my mother

watching her heart–

 

dark, liquid motion

on the screen beside her.

 

How she called it

beautiful. This is

 

please and thank you,

and softens the wounds

 

of strangers. This is a body’s

last words; what is left

 

after fire. This is cavities

in the bones of a bird

 

that make flight possible,

and flits unseen

 

through every gesture and word.

This is my mother

 

and a way out of my mother;

a place I can say

 

that I left.

 

 

Even Houseflies

 

The day they entered our house

I did not know that their brains,

 

if separated from the body,

would resemble a single grain of sugar.

 

Or that liquid is their only intake,

requiring them to moisten anything solid

 

with their own saliva. Their lives,

an array of endless regurgitations.

 

And who’s to say, after I’d killed

the last one–nine, maybe ten in all–

 

and resumed my reading,

only to be stopped by the words:

 

Even houseflies must have their angels–

that it wasn’t the angels themselves

 

who sent me to learn how they live.

Who’s to say this wasn’t the gesture

 

of some lively god pressing a small coin

into my heart. Like my mother

 

who won’t stay dead, her eyes

fixing into mine like she knows

 

I’m her best chance. Or like Otzi

who keeps coming back–as shaman

 

or shepherd–in a cloak of woven grass;

the ease with which he walks

 

on hilly terrain. Or Pliny,

studious and brave, drawing a bath

 

too close to Pompeii. Who’s to say

these aren’t the gestures of gods. Active

 

during the day, but at night they rest

in the corners of rooms, where their eyes–

 

their thousands and thousands of eyes–

make a mosaic of the dark.

 

 

Both of these poems were first published in Connotations Press, 2017

In dreams and footnotes,
the ancestors’ ghosts —
mine, yours, theirs —
prod me with splinters
of broomsticks and music stands:
It was not easier, cleaner, sweeter
once upon a time. No no no.
Can’t sing if you’re dead, baby girl: look sharp,
speak low but speak up, and praise the moss on the trees.