Poetry
Every first contains within the seed of its last. This is
part of living. Before you arrived, you appeared to me
in a dream.
FOR MY GRANDFATHER’S first death anniversary, my mother wanted me to design a thank-you card for those who supported our family throughout the year. The card featured a poem I wrote recounting one of my treasured memories with him: feeding his chickens as a rooster crowed in the wee hours of the morning. Upon reading it, one of my uncles smiled and asked, “Did you include this because your Lolo was a poet?” I didn’t. The 8,441 miles between Dallas, Texas, and Daanbantayan, Cebu, Philippines, left me bereft of the more intimate details of my grandfather’s life, including that we shared an affinity for the written word. This unexpected link soothed my suffocating sadness at our now permanent separation, thanks to a medium that is often at the crossroads of mending what is broken.
When you called from hospice
and asked what I was doing
these days, I said riding horses.
In the days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, her final words clung to me.
“I’m not mad at you,” she said. Her eyes were earnest.
More than once I’ve given away
all that was mine except a red pocketknife
and three changes of clothes. Even so
Sometimes kings raise a foundling —
it didn’t work out well for the Pharaoh —
but the opposite seems more typical.
Royals, gods, drop into the hands
of commoners. Gilgamesh, they say,
was hurled as an infant from a tower.
An eagle broke his fall; a gardener took him in.
Satyavati Kali, the female twin found in a fish
was handed back to the fisherman.
And there’s the Nazarene carpenter.
What happens to such parents? Do they win
a suite in the palace? Or do they remain at home,
fused to their roles: gardener, fisherman, carpenter,
rising early, low as dew on grass,
moving to their tasks, unchanged
by the glory they served,
set in their motions like planets,
pausing now and again in their labor
to be kissed by lapping waves,
to hear the grain of the wood
gently praising their name.
Sunday, he emerges carrying blue iris,
lilies, and maidenhair ferns,
a few cabbage palm fronds,
shears closing their silent beaks
the light just disclosed behind the river hill,
boxwood and red peeled trunks of crepe myrtles.
He picks and chooses, gathers them in his arms,
he will push the iron gate and climb the serpentine brick path.
He pitched semi-pro baseball,
golfer, lifeguard, fencing master,
a life to the body, works of reflexes,
eyes of a blue cutting-edge, deft hands, perfect ambidextrous,
slant ball, whirled ball, knee ball. He catches all.
He embraces the flowers against his chest
and deposits them by the altar,
signs himself, arranges them in a white vase.
No ball to miss.
God and prayers, fragrant Easter between his two luminous hands.
Fear turns me into a tree.
Every pruning healed
becomes an eye.
Sunlight plays the leaves,
each a pool of green incandescence,
a window to the heart.
Every wound a hieroglyph.
Each whisper a new chord.
Come inside my radiant dream:
a phoenix fruit ripens unseen.
IN “KITCHENETTE BUILDING,” Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, considers the challenge of dreaming in grim places. The setting of this 1945 poem, published as part of Brooks’ first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, is the titular kitchenette building, a housing unit of many cramped, run-down apartments, often rented by Black residents in that era in cities like Chicago. Tenants are “grayed in, and gray,” worn out by systemic injustice and the demands of daily life, such as paying rent and putting food on the table. Still, the speaker — who speaks on the behalf of a collective “we” — wonders if a dream could rise “through onion fumes” and “sing an aria” in the building.
The dream in “kitchenette building” is delicate and “fluttering,” something that requires time and contemplation — luxuries that systemic oppression makes nearly impossible. Brooks’ biographer, Angela Jackson, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, describes this poignantly: “Life is grim in these kitchenette buildings ... entrapment as in a prison. People here are not people; they are things, dehumanized by the nature of a system they did not volunteer for.” Later, she asserts that kitchenette residents “cannot even consider” a dream greater than a cold bath “[before] a realistic necessity comes up ... They take what they can get.”
Brooks makes it clear, though: Imagination is a vital precursor to liberation. “Kitchenette building” plants seeds in questions: What would happen if dreams of freedom and freshness had space to grow? What would liberation look like for Black communities and the U.S. as a whole?
I LOVE WORDS. I love etymological dictionaries packed with word genealogies. I love that apricot is a cousin to precocious, kitchen, and charcuterie. That the word word (from the Old English) is rooted in utterance and promise, in the theological sense. As in, to give one’s word.
Words spoken are different creatures than words written. Christians designated written words as more trustworthy than oral composition, but early Judaism prioritized oral transmission of sacred words — as many Indigenous communities do still. But written words (like these) can be controlled and manipulated. Writing prevents the breathed utterance from passing through the orator’s flesh to be inhaled by the communal body. Orality is to literacy as wildfire is to candle flame.
Maybe that is why I moved heaven and earth in 2000 to hear Irish poet Seamus Heaney read in person, accompanied by Liam O’Flynn on the uilleann pipes. Having studied Heaney’s written word, especially the collection Station Island, I wanted to hear the man himself, to hear him orate (from the roots of utter and praise before an assembly). I wanted to inhale his language (tribal and tongue).
IN HER REFLECTION on the work of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Sarah James sees Brooks’ poetry as asserting “our collective right to dream of a humane world.” At Sojourners, we ground our “dream of a humane world” in God’s dream for all creation to thrive — each sparrow, each planet, each one of us. And yet, our adversary attempts to occupy our souls like a “roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). It’s not just you who is overwhelmed, destabilized, scared. We mark five years of living with covid-19, as Céire Kealty reflects. President Trump is staging an all-out attack on immigrant families, as Ken Chitwood reports, while churches work to offer protection in the face of harsh deportation policies. When surrounded by the deafening “roaring lion,” it’s tempting to become small and defensive. But, as Edgar Rivera Colón writes in our cover feature, God invites us into life-giving soul work to sustain us in risky love and activism. Even when our hearts are shattered, God is ready to fuse them together. Just ask. Brooks wrote, “Life is for us, and is shining. / We have a right to sing.” Let’s be like the sparrows and sing.
I once believed I could hate intermittently,
an incandescence I could turn on and off
with the will or guide with the pressure
of my knees or with reins woven
from the clear demands of the moment.
Scriptural Time Travel
For the average reader, understanding scripture’s historical context can be overwhelming. Hosted by scholar Helen Bond and journalist Dave Roos, the podcast Biblical Time Machine provides an accessible entry point into biblical scholarship. Episode topics include slavery among early Christians and first-century childhood. BibleOdyssey
Surely I betrayed her at least three times:
eighteen months of bone-grinding hip pain,
a list of life stories never recorded, and
leaving her exposed to suffering because
I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was so hard to die.
The cock’s crow was just basic kidney physiology,
Each book, whether subtly or overtly, shows readers how to build community in the face of both real and existential danger.