You told me graveyards are that loud
and you were right. Noise skittles over crab grass
and dandelion greens, over locust stone and devil’s claw
thick with spikes and wooden lures bloody for light.
Passageways of water flow beneath them,
and the voices flow with them gray and waterproof,
overcast and significantly silent. We are a people
of mourners. Hire us. We cry on cue,
like vultures at the edge of the Sinai frontier,
like elephants leaving their path to caress
the bones of a sister. We can scream like war planes,
rend our clothing into scars, draw tattoos of death
exactly as a battle begins. Remember it was us
who fire bombed the cafes of Jaffa
and it was us who people bombed
the villages near Jerusalem.
We are one hundred sixty pounds of manure,
blood, gravel, fog – not enough
to cover all of the newly dead, but enough
to ensure there will never be silence in the graveyard.
| Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
This is an astounding poem. Back in the 70s, Robert Bly started a periodical called (not inappropriately) "The Seventies." I think there was only one issue. But that issue had an inspiring article about Dragon Leaping, those unexpected, non-intellectual, yet visceral connections that charge the poem with dynamite, letting it break through into new realms. I was never any good at it (witness my own writing), as my attempts just shattered the poem into disconnected shards. It's very hard to leap like that and yet somehow allow the poem to hang together. In "The Seventies" itself, even the sample poems by Neruda and Lorca (in translation) didn't truly manage the dynamite very well. Those poems just exploded in my face. They were interesting and messy but fractured. This poem by Mr. Brownstein, however, is a master class in Dragon Leaping. "Rend our clothing into scars" is a prime example of a huge yet subtle leap. Every leap takes the reader to a new place and enriches everything that came before. And yet the overall experience could not be more whole or wholly devastating. Truly brilliant.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I've been kicked in the stomach, kneed in the face, and I think I chipped a tooth on the way down. Talk about art stimulating emotions, Michael's poem is like getting dragged out of bed by a maniac and thrown through the second story window onto the pavement below. So true, not nearly enough guts and manure in one body, guilty or innocent, to cover the stench of the deaths fresh from today, let alone back through the ages. Oh despair, where is thy sting? Michael, man, be merciful, take it easy on us mortals.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Eric and Roger, for your kind insights, commentary and flattering remarks. Made my week start off with a jump start.
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