hello dear poets and a few poems of "witness" to share

Dear amazing poets, as you work on poems for Monday 5/11… "this is my country,"  "poems of witness," "body odes"… or whatever you happen to be working on—take the time to check out this poem by Yusef Komyunakaa, "Facing It" —what a remarkable piece it is.  I love the way such enormous themes (post traumatic stress, the painful legacy of the Vietnam War) are contained within the quiet detail of the moment, the gaze of this piece. In a way, it's both a poem of witness and an "ekphrastic" poem about Maya Ling Lin's brilliant monument. Most of you have either seen the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. or have seen photos, had it described to you… it is a reflective wall that you walk along, sort of walking down into the earth as the wall "grows," then back up out the other side as the wall becomes smaller—and on it is inscribed geometrically the names of all the 50,000 + soldiers killed.  A powerful, somber, experience to walk along it.  So what Komyunakaa does is play off of the reflective obsidian quality that as you pause and peer into the wall, you are in fact actually also seeing reflections of things behind and above you, and of course… you are also seeing your own "reflection"—memories, thoughts, flashbacks, free associations. It's the moment itself that is the poem here. Komyunakaa simply honors it—the art; the facts of the matter; the interrupted stillness; distant, awful memory, pain, loss — just as it is.  It's a fine poem. Once again, the poem isn't pushed on us.  It's allowed to exist.

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Also, here's another poem I ran across this week, a new poem by the brilliant American poet, Mark Doty (a top-ten guy for sure among my generation). It's about the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the young African American kid with the toy gun shot by the policeman a few months ago. So it's a sort of a very fresh, raw example of "a poem of witness"—a meditation on the emotional cost and the brutal effect of unthinking police violence.

MARK DOTY IN TWO SECONDS         Tamir Rice,  2002 - 2014

                                       the boy’s face 

climbed back down the twelve-year tunnel 

of its becoming,  a charcoal sunflower 

swallowing itself. Who has eyes to see, 

or ears to hear? If you could see 

what happens fastest, unmaking

the human irreplaceable, a star 

falling into complete gravitational 

darkness from all points of itself, all this:

the held loved body into which entered 

milk and music,  honeying the cells of him:

who sang to him, stroked the nap 

of the scalp, kissed the flesh-knot

after the cord completed its work 

of fueling into him the long history 

of those whose suffering

was made more bearable 

by the as-yet-unknown of him,

playing alone in some unthinkable 

future city, a Cleveland, 

whatever that might be. 

Two seconds. To elapse:

the arc of joy in the conception bed,

the labor of hands repeated until 

the hands no longer required attention,

so that as the woman folded 

her hopes for him sank into the fabric 

of his shirts and underpants. Down 

they go, swirling down into the maw 

of a greater dark. Treasure box,

comic books, pocket knife, bell from a lost cat’s collar,

why even begin to enumerate them

when behind every tributary 

poured into him comes rushing backward 

all he hasn’t been yet. Everything 

that boy could have thought or made, 

sung or theorized, built on the quavering 

but continuous structure

that had preceded him sank into 

an absence in the shape of a boy

playing with a plastic gun in a city park 

in Ohio, in the middle of the afternoon. 

When I say two seconds, I don’t mean the time 

it took him to die. I mean the lapse between

the instant the cruiser braked to a halt 

on the grass, between that moment

and the one in which the officer fired his weapon.

The two seconds taken to assess the situation. 

I believe it is part of the work 

of poetry to try on at least

the moment and skin of another, 

for this hour I respectfully decline.

I refuse it. May that officer 

be visited every night of his life

by an enormity collapsing in front of him

into an incomprehensible bloom,

and the voice that howls out of it.

If this is no poem then…

But that voice –- erased boy, 

beloved of time, who did nothing 

to no one and became 

nothing because of it –- I know that voice 

is one of the things we call poetry.

It isn’t only to his killer he’s speaking.