Poetry
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I saw her in the month of mumps
puffed up in poverty’s robes,
a woman of fragments,
a shuffling quilt with running threads—
more holes, really, than skein.
You could read history in the headlines
she wore, partial untruths, incomplete
fictions. All of her lovers
failed to match the shoes she put on.
Every child she birthed missed having
national sunshine and two names.
She dodged taxes on her home;
it never had an address to speak of and
moved like wind-spinning, clanking aluminum cans
she chased for pennies.
Her boudoir looked like a butcher’s sleeve;
stolen ketchup packets from McDonald’s
provided ambergris for her perfume.
She was disqualified for any entitlements
except for open dumpsters on eyeless streets.
But mail always waited for her
no postage due; she was the patron
of the discarded; on winter nights the USPS
coated her from the leprous jaws of the wind.
She slept at the homes of three different zip codes
one January; always leaving at dawn’s early light;
she thought the flag needed to be washed.
Watching the evening news
He stumbles along in broken gait, pale face frozen
in a blank stare, and all the long, long river of moving
bodies pass him by. Even the frail move faster,
framing him against their blur of anguish, like a film
that runs slow motion, etching one small
centerpiece against the screen of the unwilling eye.
Upon his back—as if coupled there, ribs fused to ribs—
rides an ancient man, more skeletal than fleshed,
skull rocking gently, rhythmically, arms crooked
absurdly over the hard-set slope of shoulders, hands
snatching at the brittle air. Thin-stick shanks
dangle loosely over the young man’s arms, bobbing
with the plunge and stagger of his legs—like
metronomes that pace the broken angle of each step.
And still they come, he comes—this strange, two-
headed creature all its own, with its four unseeing eyes,
its single haunted soul. Like a crab caught in an
unremitting tide—an awful metamorphosis, a horror
that we cannot look upon, nor speak of, nor forget.
Still he comes, inseparable, inexorable. The dying and
the young—a ghost that rides the shoulders of the world.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where
was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream.
—The Pilgrim’s Progress
I stand at the edge of these sharded cliffs
Time and the sea have splintered away
From this rotten stump of island,
Fit only for felons and the likes of me.
The glorious ocean spreads out of sight,
Moving, moving, with no signs of life.
But, beneath the calm I know there lies
An empire old as the birth of time,
A kingdom swollen with citizenry:
Jellyfish, groupers, turtles, rays,
Serpents splitting the currents like grass,
Sharks and the fearsome leviathan.
Freedom? You can’t get there from here.
But from where I stand I could leap out,
Crash through blue mist coiling the shore,
Mesh with the pebbles that constitute
The thread of beach strung out below,
And wait for Jesus to remember me.
On the other hand, I could just crawl
Back into my cave, do my best to ignore
The lost years charcoaled on the walls
And the stench of human occupation,
Lie down, stretch out, fold my hands
Behind my head, and close my eyes,
My last thoughts being, before sleep:
If the deep blue holds such mystery,
What must the secrets of heaven be?
Unsure of my crossing, I stand and wait at the Jabbok
In a wrestling rhyme of rapids. The waters from the river
Rise around my fears and blur my eyes. I am uncertain
Where my footfall will land. My sandal slides turning on rocks.
I watch others cross ahead of me with obedience,
While I drop back to the crisis I find lurking
In the shadows of my soul. A drought-coward spirit
Dries up the will and burns through my identity
Destroying the brittle nature of my grip on this land
That waits on the other side of the river.
I am stalking through the darkness of my soul
For the person waiting beyond my dreams. The twin
Shadow of a birthright slips through my memory.
My father’s blessing evaporates in my mother’s maneuvers of facts.
My brain is a soup of deception: my mind is a sheep blind
Without a shepherd to open the gate. Unvoiced by silence,
I wait, unable to cross, paralyzed and unprepared without a prayer.
The void of doubt drifts into night where demons perch
In my dreams foaming at the ford of the river in my head.
“Has the United States ever apologized?
Or are we too big to apologize?”
—Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson
The Chaplains Handbook has no confiteor or rite,
neither Book of Common Prayer nor missalette,
for scrutinies that beg forgiveness from the torn
and desecrated dead. We come contrite
for reports of helicopter gunships,
bodies observed in a ditch, the undress
of a girl who covered only her eyes:
Noncombatant gang rape, with bayonet.
How to bring god closer
after the frenzy, the snarling riots,
this god hanging on a tree?
Do I stand here, as the story goes,
looking, do nothing, imagine
pouring myself toward him,
a flame across a field?
Or would I go there,
climb up, pry the first nails out
with the claw of a hammer,
wrap my arm tightly around his waist,
like my son I rescue from a branch too high?
I struggle to keep his weight on my hip,
his arm over my shoulder
while I wrest the other nails loose.
Smelling his sweat and tears,
I hoist him, lower him to the ground,
and then, with a wet cloth,
wash blood and dirt from his face,
tell him it will be all right now.
Enter this room and call it a cell.
Fold yourself and put yourself away.
For your whole life, you will be an amateur.
But be an amateur striving.
Enter this room and call it vigilance.
Make your ego the threadbare rug you walk on.
Before your quiet face, hold
the fane of your folded hands.
Fold yourself and put yourself away.
Become the parent to your parents.
Cast their names on the wind of your breathing.
Enter this room and be alone with dialogue.
Take the name of silence and let it speak.
Pavel L Photo and Video / Shutterstock
WHEN I WAS BORN—the first child of Dan Berrigan’s brother Phil and Elizabeth McAlister—my uncle sent my parents a sheaf of poetry. On it, he wrote a note: “Dears, I send these with trepidation. They are uneven; but then so is life, no? Love, Daniel.”
My parents put the dozen or so poems in a book and gave them to me on my eighth birthday with their own note: “We don’t expect you to understand all of them yet but you can now begin to read and grow with them.” Yet. Right. I am now 34 years older than I was when I first opened the little red bound book of handwritten poems, and I don’t understand them any better.
But now that my dearest Unka has passed from this world, I hold on tight to this collection and try really hard to understand. It is going to be tough. The poems are full of words the dictionary either fails to define or further confuses—supramundane, Blake’s child, Dante’s paradise (what are boys from middle school doing in Unka’s poetry?), “the bodhisattva is neither stuporous nor sleek / he is crucified.”
Fragments of these poems cycle through my head all the time, a sort of back rhythm to daily life, especially when that daily life was graced with Unka.
Uncle Dan and I would walk—down New York City’s Broadway and through Riverside Park. He breathed in such love for the natural world, even amid the Upper West Side’s hustles and bumps. He saw everything, and found the beauty that was there. The only people that made him mad were delivery men riding bikes on the sidewalks—he had been knocked down once by them and he worried about the elderly—and people who lost themselves in their phones.
Panya Anakotmankong / Shutterstock
We are the long grass and anxious wind,
the generations, speaking softly, between
the lines of history.
IN THE POEMS OF PARNESHIA JONES, 35, the lines of black history that angled north from the Deep South after the First World War empty into the bruised and tender histories of family and community.
The lines above are from “Legacy,” one of the poems from her first collection, Vessel (Milkweed Editions), dedicated to Evanston, Ill., Jones’ hometown, and the home of Shorefront, the organization that documents black lives on the North Shore of Chicago.
“I had a lot of storytellers around me growing up,” Jones tells Sojourners. “My grandmother was a storyteller, my grandpop was a storyteller. I was always the youngest of the group, so I was trained to listen. When you listen to everyone else, you carve out a space to listen to yourself. Young poets should listen more to their families, to the voices they heard growing up.”
The poet says she was raised in her grandfather’s juke joint. He migrated north from Mississippi. Her first dog came from Gypsies who hung out outside his clubs.
Jones’ voice, even when banked by the din of a mid-Manhattan restaurant, is soft, leisurely. Telling her story, she will not be hurried. Her story begins with a portentous name, the spawn of chance.
Jaroslaw Grudzinski / Shutterstock
ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, just after she and her husband had bought a house in the countryside outside of Louisville, Ky., Kathleen Driskell returned home from the grocery to find her driveway filled with cars. With one arm grasping bags of food and the other holding on to her young son, she looked around to see what was happening. Mournful figures in dark coats were moving back and forth in the lot next door to her house. And then her eyes rested on something that made her jaw drop: a hearse.
On one hand, Driskell shouldn’t have been surprised. The house she and her husband purchased was actually an old country church dating from the 1850s, which they had begun converting into a home, transforming the sanctuary into an open living and dining room and using the honey-colored pews to build a staircase. Like most rural churches from the 19th century, it was right beside a graveyard. But the old preacher who sold them the building had assured them it was no longer in use, that there would be no more burials. “I asked him flat out,” she recalls with a smile. “And he said that it was full up and it’s been full up.”
Over the years, there have been eight or nine more burials in the graveyard next door. But after recovering from her initial shock at happening upon that first scene, Driskell realized that she didn’t mind. “I just don’t think about graveyards that way,” she says. “I never really have thought about them as being spooky places.” Instead, she has found herself inspired by the cemetery and its dead—so intrigued, in fact, that she has written a poetry collection about her experience with her “neighbors,” as she calls them, documenting her literal and imaginative walks among the tombstones.
I HAD GEARED myself up for a sort of Job-God exchange between Mary Oliver and some wild roses in the aptly named “Roses,” from her latest collection of poems, Felicity.
This is the scene: The narrator, full of poetic angst and existential fatalism, approaches some huddled roses and wonders in their direction: “What happens when the curtain goes / down and nothing stops it, not kissing, / not going to the mall, not the Super Bowl.”
I was ready for the roses to respond in a whirlwind full of rhetorical questions about the wonder and origin of creation. Instead they deflect the inquiry: “‘But as you can see, we are / just now entirely busy being roses.’”
And I laughed. In the past, Oliver’s poetry has caused me to cry over a dog (see “The First Time Percy Came Back”) and pray accidentally (see “The Summer Day”), but never before had her poems made me laugh.
In her 2014 collection Blue Horses, the flowers are “fragile blue.” They are “wrinkled and fading in the grass” until the next morning when somehow they crawl back up to the shrubs, bloom a bit, decide they want—just like all of us—“a little more of / life.” Now, in her latest collection of poetry, Oliver’s flowers are red, and they want as much life as they can get. They are carefree roses with a love of causal banter and a kind distaste for troubling existential questions.
