I decided to edit some of the poems I wrote in the Calabash poetry workshops with Kwame Dawes and Greg Pardlo. Here are the edited versions
Reflections
A father screams for his son
who was thrown into the sea
wishing the gods will spit his son
back into his arms.
The ship feels lighter.
Moonlight creeps into the ship,
it allows me to see his eyes
purple shades of his bruised face
that hides in shadows.
He sucks milk from a woman's breast
while she hushes her dead baby
I suck hard on the blood
beneath the shackles on my wrists.
I try to suppress the vomit
rising in my chest
I can see the silver leaking from his eyes,
but he never looks at me.
We work together
but he never looks at me.
How can we connect in these fields
if he does not speak to me.
When the family passes us,
he watches them
while leaning on the stone wall.
His palms flat on the rocks,
like a wolf looking into a full moon.
His eyes tell a story,
Yellow and red shades of the Sclera
Scarred eyelids and eyebrows.
His face shows his struggles,
his cheeks, the cuts
on the skin that hugs his jawbones.
I want to know more,
but he never speaks to me.
The day he did,
I was filled with regret.
He planned our exodus
their punishment.
We stood in the woods
waiting for the moonlight
before throwing handfuls of sunlight
onto the roof.
I could not concentrate
I was distracted
by the confused screams
of a little girl.
I wanted to find her
but I couldn't follow the sound.
So I ran to the rivers,
haunted by the screams.
The moon guides me like a torch.
As I swim down the river
and the water steals my breath
I wonder if the girl would suffocate
before turning to ash and smoke.
Sun and Snow
Layers of cotton
slide on face like silk
makes crunching noise
underneath my boots.
The leaves burn
in the sunrise.
Red leaves, white snow
freezing and melting.
God and the Devil,
dancing,
fighting,
making art together.
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I love the last verse. That on its own is a whole poem. It provokes so much thought....
ReplyDeleteReflections is a really powerful piece of work Simon. The imagery is excellent, you really feel as if you're on a Middle passage voyage. I like the seeming connection between the slave's loss of his son and his participation in murdering another child. For me, that had the strongest impact.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first read through this poem, what struck me was the distance between the narrator and "he." The distance was such that I thought that the word "he" referred not to another slave but rather to the master. Masters and slaves "worked together", if you call the slave master sitting atop a horse "supervising" work "working together." I thought their working together was ironic.
ReplyDeleteOn second reading of the poem I understood it. Even understanding it, the image of "throwing handfuls of sunlight" remains confusing. In the second stanza after "throwing handfuls of sunlight" you use the word "torch." If you were to tie the stanzas together it would make the poem pop: "handfuls of sunlight" would remain ambiguous until two stanzas later where you reveal the "handfuls of sunlight" were torches.
For example, I think the following little change makes the poem taken as a whole clearer:
We stood in the woods
waiting for the moonlight
before throwing handfuls of sunlight
onto the roof.
I could not concentrate
I was distracted
by the confused screams
of a little girl.
I wanted to find her
but I couldn't follow the sound.
So I ran to the rivers,
haunted by the screams.
The moon guides me like
the torches we threw.
Peace,
Matthew Koslowski
I expanded the thoughts I shared above in an essay I wrote for my own blog.
ReplyDeleteThe Prestige in Poetry
Peace,
Matthew Koslowski