Poetry

Motherhood, 1951 – Ai

Dear Saint Patrick, this is Peggy,
Or maybe it’s Pegeen to you,
Well, I’m really Stella Mae.
Peggy’s my nickname,
But anyway, will you please tell me
What to do about the rattlesnake
That’s in my room?
I know it’s there,
But I can’t find it anywhere I search.
I’ve ransacked the closet more than once,
Because that’s where we found the skin it shed.
I even put the cat in there and shut the door,
But he only went to sleep on my new dress
Which he had clawed from a hanger.
My grandma, Maggie, says you drove the snakes from Ireland
And they came here to Arizona.
She’s right, you know
For didn’t a rattler kill our cat, Blackie?
There he was beside the porch, stiff as a board
And baby Florence saw it.
She’s only three and doesn’t need to see death like that, not yet.
If you can, let her believe for now
That we will live forever.
Anyhow, I’m pregnant again.
I know I’ve sinned
But I am paying for it.
Don’t make my girl suffer
Because her mother used poor judgment
And got herself in trouble out of wedlock.
My mother’s disappointed in me.
My father doesn’t care
And says I don’t have to marry
Just to have a name for this one in the oven.
Father says there’s nothing wrong with our name
And will serve the babe as well as any other,
But mother is determined to give this one a legal father
Like Baby Florence has, but only on paper.
She doesn’t have a father either,
But she’s got her granddad, he says
And goes to work. He is a barber.
Mother is a cook and she works longer hours,
So I’m here with Baby Florence
And that infernal snake all day.
Outside, the new cat, dogs, chickens and hogs
Roam about the yard,
But they can’t help me, can they?
I keep praying, but you don’t answer.
I guess you’ve got no time for me,
So armed with a shovel,
I go in the closet once again
And succeed in smashing a wall.
Bits of plaster fall on my head,
But I don’t mind.
I’d rather be dead than never find the thing
That crawls about the room
Without fear of discovery.
This morning, I woke up to find a coiled imprint
At the foot of my bed.
They say I am protected from harm
Because the Virgin Mary put her heel
Upon a snake’s head and crushed it
For the sake of all pregnant women.
I am safe, I say to myself and pray for mercy
And recall the dead baby diamondback we found last fall.
It glittered like a tiny jeweled bracelet
And I almost picked it up,
Before I remembered my own warning to my daughter
To never, ever pick up anything suspicious.
I wish I’d done that with the man partly responsible
For the mess I’ve made.
The diamondback was like the lust I felt for him.
It glittered so beautifully
I had to pick it up and wear it for awhile,
Then like some Lazarus, it came to life,
By striking me with its poisonous fangs,
Leaving me to pay for my crime
Once by lying to myself
And twice for good measure.
Now I must suffer for my pleasure.
I curse, slam the wall again
And feel pain radiating from my navel
Down through my bowels
And am not able to get to the telephone
To call my mother.
I hear a splash and all of a sudden,
The snake darts from the hole I made in the wall
And crawls forward to slake its thirst.
I grit my teeth, but stand stock still
As the pain gnaws at my vitals.
I try to show no fear
As the snake takes a long drink of my water
Then slithers away,
But not fast enough to escape,
As screaming with pain and rage
with all the mother instinct I can muster,
and in the Virgin Mary’s name,
I raise the shovel and smash the snake,
Crushing its head,
As I double over and fall beside it
On the red, concrete floor.
For awhile, a ripple runs through its body,
Then it is still.
When my pain subsides, I fall asleep
And dream I’m dead
And hundreds of baby snakes are gathered at my wake.
They crawl all over my body
And I try to shake them off,
Until I realize they’re part of me.

At Saint Mary’s Hospital, the nurses and my doctor
Tell me how courageous I am
And the nuns even come to visit me.
They claim I have performed a miracle
And should be canonized.
Saint Peggy. “How does that sound?”
I ask Saint Patrick aloud
When left alone to hold my child.
I smile at her and tell her she is blessed.
The nuns have gone off to light some candles
And in the chapel.
They say they’re praying for special dispensation
But I don’t need that and neither does my girl.

Back home, after a few days, I realize

That I made a mistake in thinking I could take away my sins
When Mother tells me my new daughter is cursed
Because I killed a snake the day she was born.
“What a cruel mother you are,” I tell her
And she says, “Yes, I’m just like all the others.
I should have smothered you when you were born.
I was so torn up inside, I nearly died for you
And you repay me with not one bastard, but two.
I never thought I’d call a whore my daughter.”
When I protest, she says, “There’s the door.”
After that, I decide to ignore her
And in a state between agitation and rest,
I remember something I had forgotten.
As I lay beside the snake.
I saw a tiny bunch of eggs spill out of her
And realized she was an expectant mother too
And simply wanted a drink to soothe herself
One desert afternoon
When mothers must decide to save
Or execute their children.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMI…

Related Links:

Derek Walcott’s Nobel Speech (excerpt)

Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given names of places accepted like Felicity village or Choisseul. The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle.

And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the sum of history, Trollope’s ‘non-people’. A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in t he New World, a writer’s heaven.

 

Source

Related articles

The New Hieroglyphics – Les Murray

In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.

Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken. People use their own words.

Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2SO4, for musical notes,
but mostly it’s diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure

have escaped their toilet doors. I (that is, saya,
ego, watashi wa) am two eyes without pupils;
those aren’t seen when you look out through them.

You has both pupils, we has one, and one blank.
Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips
is confidential. Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.

The effort is always to make the symbols obvious:
the bolt of electricity, winged stethoscope of course
for flying doctor. Pram under fire? Soviet film industry.

Pictographs also shouldn’t be too culture-bound:
a heart circled and crossed out surely isn’t.
For red, betel spit lost out to ace of diamonds.

Black is the ace of spades. The king of spades
reads Union boss, the two is feeble effort.
If is the shorthand Libra sign, the scales.

Spare literal pictures render most nouns and verbs
and computers can draw them faster than Pharough’s scribes.
A bordello prospectus is as explicit as the action,

but everywhere there’s sunflower talk, i.e.
metaphor, as we’ve seen. A figure riding a skyhook
bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace,

two animals in a book read Nature, two books
inside an animal, instinct. Rice in bowl with chopsticks
denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.

Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech
balloon is ubiquitous. A bull inside one is dialect
for placards inside one. Sun and moon together

inside one is poetry. Sun and moon over palette,
over shoes etc. are all art forms–but above
a cracked heart and champagne glass? Riddle that

and you’re starting to think in World, whose grammar
is Chinese-terse and fluid. Who needs the square-
equals-diamond book, the dictionary, to know figures

led by strings to their genitals mean fashion?
just as a skirt beneath a circle means demure
or a similar circle shouldering two arrows is macho.

All peoples are at times cat in water with this language
but it does promote international bird on shoulder.
This foretaste now lays its knife and fork parallel.

Source

Related Links:

LesMurray.org

Interview with Les Murray

A Noun Sentence – Mahmoud Darwish

A noun sentence, no verb
to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed
after making love … a salty perfume
or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy
like the sunset at your strange windows.
My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding
my need, hesitant between two doors:
entry a joke, and exit
a labyrinth. Where is my shadow—my guide amid
the crowdedness on the road to judgment day? And I
as an ancient stone of two dark colors in the city wall,
chestnut and black, a protruding insensitivity
toward my visitors and the interpretation of shadows. Wishing
for the present tense a foothold for walking behind me
or ahead of me, barefoot. Where
is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where
is futility? Where is the road to the road?
And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present
tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate
and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam
of speech the dots on the letters,
wishing for the present tense a foothold
on the pavement …

Source

 

Related Links:

Mahmoud Darwish’s website

Darwish on Poets.org

The Sea-Turtle and the Shark – Melvin B. Tolson

Strange but true is the story
of the sea-turtle and the shark-
the instinctive drive of the weak to survive
in the oceanic dark.
Driven,
riven
by hunger
from abyss to shoal,
sometimes the shark swallows
the sea-turtle whole.

The sly reptilian marine
withdraws,
into the shell
of his undersea craft,
his leathery head and the rapacious claws
that can rip
a rhinoceros’ hide
or strip
a crocodile to fare-thee-well;
now,
inside the shark,
the sea-turtle begins the churning seesaws
of his descent into pelagic hell;
then…then,
with ravenous jaws
that can cut sheet steel scrap,
the sea-turtle gnaws
…and gnaws…and gnaws
his way in a way that appalls-
his way to freedom,
beyond the vomiting dark
beyond the stomach walls
of the shark.

 

excerpted from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry

Ode on Dictionaries–Barbara Hamby

A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page
  one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge
begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk,
  one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock
clerk of clichés that she is, at the moment going ape
  the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape
disguised as her brain, a rococo lexicon
  of Deuteronomy, Job, gossip, spritz, and neocon
ephemera all wrapped up in a pop burrito
  of movie star shenanigans, like a stray Cheeto
found in your pocket the day after you finish the bag,
  tastier than any oyster and champagne fueled fugue 
gastronomique you have been pursuing in France
  for the past four months. This 82-year-old's rants
have taken their place with the dictionary I bought
  in the fourth grade, with so many gorgeous words I thought
I'd never plumb its depths. Right the first time, little girl,
  yet here I am still at it, trolling for pearls,
Japanese words vying with Bantu in a goulash
  I eat daily, sometimes gagging, sometimes with relish,
kleptomaniac in the candy store of language,
  slipping words in my pockets like a non-smudge
lipstick that smears with the first kiss. I'm the demented
  lady with sixteen cats. Sure, the house stinks, but those damned
mice have skedaddled, though I kind of miss them, their cute
  little faces, the whiskers, those adorable gray suits.
No, all beasts are welcome in my menagerie, ark
  of inconsolable barks and meows, sharp-toothed shark,
OED of the deep ocean, sweet compendium
  of candy bars—Butterfingers, Mounds, and M&Ms—
packed next to the tripe and gizzards, trim and tackle
  of butchers and bakers, the painter's brush and spackle,
quarks and black holes of physicists' theory. I'm building
  my own book as a mason makes a wall or a gelding
runs round the track—brick by brick, step by step, word by word,
  jonquil by gerrymander, syllabub by greensward,
swordplay by snapdragon, a never-ending parade
  with clowns and funambulists in my own mouth, homemade
treasure chest of tongue and teeth, the brain's roustabout, rough
  unfurler of tents and trapezes, off-the-cuff
unruly troublemaker in the high church museum
  of the world. O mouth—boondoggle, auditorium,
viper, gulag, gumbo pot on a steamy August
  afternoon—what have you not given me? How I must
wear on you, my Samuel Johnson in a frock coat,
  lexicographer of silly thoughts, billy goat,
X-rated pornographic smut factory, scarfer
  of snacks, prissy smirker, late-night barfly,
you are the megaphone by which I bewitch the world
  or don't as the case may be. O chittering squirrel,
ziplock sandwich bag, sound off, shut up, gather your words
  into bouquets, folios, flocks of black and flaming birds.

Related Links:

Barbara Hamby

Note: this a repost as the original post was not formatted correctly.

Derek Walcott Reading and Question/Answer

I am starting to work my slow way through Omeros. I stopped to google Omeros – Derek Walcott. I found the following link. It’s him reading a very brief excerpt and then taking questions from the audience. You will have to scroll through the list of names to find Walcott. They also have episodes with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nawal El Sadaawi, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Chinua Achebe, Khaled Hosseini and Gunter Grass.

BBC – Podcasts – World Book Club.

It was my First Nursing Job – Belle Waring

For the rest of the year, I will be posting bits and pieces from books I’ve read this year…even if they didn’t make it on my end of the year roundup. Today’s “bit” is Belle Waring’s It Was My First Nursing Job excerpted from Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.

 

It was my First Nursing Job

and I was stupid in it. I thought a doctor would not be unkind.
One wouldn’t wait for a laboring woman to dilate to ten cm.

He’d brace one hand up his patient’s vagina,
clamp the other on her pregnant belly, and force the fetus

through an eight-centimeter cervix.
She tore, of course. Bled.

Stellate lacerations extend from the cervix
like an asterisk. The staff nurses stormed and hissed

but the head nurse shrugged, He doesn’t like to wait around.
No other doctor witnessed what he did. The man was an elder

in his church. He chattered and smiled broadly as he worked.
He wore the biggest gloves we could stock.

It was my first real job and I was scared in it.
One night a patient of his was admitted

bleeding. The charge nurse said, He won’t rip her.
You take this one.

So I took her.
She quickly delivered a dead baby boy.

Not long dead-you could tell by the skin, intact.
But long enough.

When I wrapped him in a blanket, the doctor flipped open the cover
to let the mother view the body, according to custom.

The baby lay beside her.
He lay stretched out and still.

What a pity, the doctor said.
He seized the baby’s penis between his own forefinger and thumb.

It was the first time I had ever seen a male not circumcised
and I was taken aback by the beauty of it.

Look, said the doctor, a little boy. Just what we wanted.
His hand, huge on the child, held the penis as if he’d found

a lovecharm hidden in his grandmother’s linen.
And then he dropped it.

The mother didn’t make a sound.
When the doctor left, she said to me in a far flat voice

I called and told him I was bleeding bad.
He told me not to worry.

I don’t remember what I said. Just that
when I escorted her husband from the lobby

the doctor had already gone home. The new father followed me
with a joyful strut. I thought Sweet Jesus Christ

-Did the doctor speak to you?
-No ma’am, the father said.

I said quick-as-I-could-so-I-wouldn’t-have-to-think-
The baby didn’t make it.

The man doubled over. I told him all wrong.
I would do it all over again.

Say-
Please, sir. Sit down. I’m so very sorry to tell you

No. It’s been sixteen years.
I would say, I am your witness.

No. I would never have told the whole truth.
Forgive me.

It was my first job
and I was lost in it.

Bones of Contention – Wanda Coleman

for Lois, deceased

he described you as a cracker battle axe
but the woman i met was thin and haint-like

i spoke to you as little as one can speak
to an in-law and get along
as did you
we never called one another by name
converse for the sake of function
biding, tolerant

whenever the three of us sat down together
he preached his gospel of civil rights
you silent, as was i
wishing he would let us be-each in her own distance

and as the social pressures of our miscegnation
ate away love
i tried to make him understand
the dangers

the whip has bitten into the back of the slave
clean through to the heart

sing dixie
wave the stars & bars

our marriage decomposed into a gangrenous animosity
no understanding-black or white

six years after divorce he called long distance
you were dying of colon cancer
your last wish
to see your grandchildren

he begged me to send the kids

i said no

and he will never understand

(excerpted from African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems

 

Related Links:

What the Gin Rummy Queen Taught Me (poem)

Bedtime Story (poem)