Moon
A poem has never made me sick before.
I have cried, and I have shared in grief.
But I have not felt the signs: goosebumps on my arms, the prickling that precedes nausea, or the raw meat texture in my throat of my body upturning.
When I read dirty south moon, I was sick. It was my body’s way of processing what I could not understand. In order for me to justify this for you, you have to know that it happened here:
child falling out who stops crying stomped upon
by men swelled pale with lies no blink of its eyes
no staring at mother’s face no bewilderment at first light
I found out Mary Turner was seven months pregnant when she was lynched, days after her husband was lynched, by a mob of more than 15 white people who were never tried for their murders. And then 500 black people fled the town because of the violent rampages where 11 more black people were lynched.
They cut her baby out of her. The baby cried two feeble cries; Mary had been set on fire and lynched and cut open.
One breath at a time.
And that’s what the poem feels like to me. One phrase at a time, separated by pauses. Incomprehensible reality told breath by breath, because there is no other way.
This poem is swaying like the necklace of a woman’s body Jeffers evokes. The throat is where air escapes and joins the body. The poem lives caught in the throat like a life stolen.
This poem twists as it goes. It haunts. The speaker in this poem insists, again and again, that we look at the moon, not for an answer nor an apology, but so that we never look away.
A poem has never made me sick before.
I have cried, and I have shared in grief.
But I have not felt the signs: goosebumps on my arms, the prickling that precedes nausea, or the raw meat texture in my throat of my body upturning.
When I read dirty south moon, I was sick. It was my body’s way of processing what I could not understand. In order for me to justify this for you, you have to know that it happened here:
child falling out who stops crying stomped upon
by men swelled pale with lies no blink of its eyes
no staring at mother’s face no bewilderment at first light
I found out Mary Turner was seven months pregnant when she was lynched, days after her husband was lynched, by a mob of more than 15 white people who were never tried for their murders. And then 500 black people fled the town because of the violent rampages where 11 more black people were lynched.
They cut her baby out of her. The baby cried two feeble cries; Mary had been set on fire and lynched and cut open.
One breath at a time.
And that’s what the poem feels like to me. One phrase at a time, separated by pauses. Incomprehensible reality told breath by breath, because there is no other way.
This poem is swaying like the necklace of a woman’s body Jeffers evokes. The throat is where air escapes and joins the body. The poem lives caught in the throat like a life stolen.
This poem twists as it goes. It haunts. The speaker in this poem insists, again and again, that we look at the moon, not for an answer nor an apology, but so that we never look away.
Out of the entire collection this is also the poem that refuses to leave my body. Days after reading it I tried looking to the moon to find refuge, to use its white light to wipe my vision clean. I found no comfort, only a clear round reflection that continues to keep time, swaying from side to side upon my eyes.
ReplyDeleteEven your post gave me chills. It's a great homage to this brutality and the lives lost and to the poem
ReplyDeletee
Thank you for sharing so intimately about your visceral experience of this poem -- "The raw meat texture" of your throat, where the poem lives "caught like a life stolen." It's a testament to the power of Jeffers' work that these unvoiced pauses - these silences, these chasms, these seeming moments of emptiness -- can evoke a texture in the reader's throat, can infect their bodies. As a singer (with a deeply complicated relationship to singing - that's for the next memoir!), I'm fascinated by the role of throats and the voice in all its many facets. Your post made me think about how we can write from our throats. How our language (which goes beyond the words - it's the gaps and pauses and the look of everything on the page) can reflect the action of our throats, whether they're closed, or gaping, or resounding with song.
ReplyDelete