storyrainthejournal | One of the powers of poetry...

This past weekend I had to think on a brief note to accompany my story "The Bottom Garden" (appearing in Postscripts #26/27 this summer, the issue titled Unfit for Eden after the lead story by Michael Bishop). And I thought of this poem by Adrienne Rich which is a poem that resonated so deeply and personally for me, from the first time I read it in college, that I was weeping by the last two lines of the first stanza. This, I said, pointing to the poem, explains me. That is one of the powers of poetry.

It had been years since I read the poem, so I dug it out (after failing to find it in its entirety anywhere on the internets). Though I'm not that abandoned child anymore, and there are other poems I might go to now that resonate just as strongly for me, I was again crying as I read. Now, though, I can respond to the poem's last two lines: friends, love, telling story, breathing deep every moment that you're graced with life.

Since it's also National Poetry Month, I thought I'd share the poem:

In the Wake of Home

You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains

Posters a pile of animals on the bed

A woman and a man who love you

And each other slip the door ajar

You are almost asleep they crouch in turn

To stroke your hair you never wake

This happens every night for years.

This never happened.

Your lips steady never say

It should have been this way

That’s not what you say

You so carefully not asking, Why?

Your eyes looking straight in mine

remind me of a woman’s

auburn hair my mother’s hair

but you never saw that hair

The family coil so twisted, tight and loose

anyone trying to leave

has to strafe the field

burn the premises down

The home houses

mirages memory fogs the kitchen panes

the rush-hour traffic outside

has the same old ebb and flow

Out on the darkening block

somebody calls you home

night after night then never again

Useless for you to know

they tried to do what they could

before they left for good

The voice that used to call you home

has gone off on the wind

beaten into thinnest air

whirling down other streets

or maybe the mouth was burnt to ash

maybe the tongue was torn out

brownlung has stolen the breath

or fear has stolen the breath

maybe under another name

it sings on AM radio:

And if you knew, what would you know?

But you will be drawn to places

where generations lie

side by side with each other:

fathers, mothers and children

in the family prayerbook

or the country burying-ground

You will hack your way back through the bush

to the Jodensavanne

where the gravestones are black with mould

You will stare at old family albums

with their smiles their resemblances

you will want to believe that nobody

wandered off became strange

no woman dropped her baby and ran

no father took off for the hills

no axe splintered the door

—that once at least it was all in order

and nobody came to grief

Any time you go back

where absence began

the kitchen faucet sticks in a way you know

you have to pull the basement door

in before drawing the bolt

the last porch-step is still loose

the water from the tap

is the old drink of water

Any time you go back

the familiar underpulse

will start its throbbing: Home, home!

and the hole torn and patched over

will gape unseen again

Even where love has run thin

the child’s soul musters strength

calling on dust-motes song on the radio

closet-floor of galoshes

stray cat piles of autumn leaves

whatever comes along

—the rush of purpose to make a life

worth living past abandonment

building the layers up again

over the torn hole filling in

And what of the stern and faithful aunt

the fierce grandmother the anxious sister

the good teacher the one

who stood at the crossing when you had to cross

the woman hired to love you

the skeleton who held out a crust

the breaker of rules the one

who is neither a man nor a woman

who warmed the liquid vein of life

and day after day whatever the need

handed it on to you?

You who did and had to do

so much for yourself this was done for you

by someone who did what they could

when others left for good

You imagine an alley a little kingdom

where the mother-tongue is spoken

a village of shelters woven

or sewn of hides in a long-ago way

a shanty standing up

at the edge of sharecropped fields

a tenement where life is seized by the teeth

a farm battened down on snowswept plains

a porch with rubber-plant and glider

on a steep city street

You imagine the people would all be there

fathers mothers and children

the ones you were promised would all be there

eating arguing working

trying to get on with life

you imagine this used to be

for everyone everywhere

10.

What if I told you your home

is this continent of the homeless

of children sold taken by force

driven from their mothers’ land

killed by their mothers to save from capture

—this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood

of languages tabooed

diasporas unrecorded

undocumented refugees

underground railroads trails of tears

What if I tell you your home

is this planet of warworn children

women and children standing in line or milling

endlessly calling each others’ names

What if I tell you, you are not different

it’s the family albums that lie

—will any of this comfort you

and how should this comfort you?

11.

The child’s soul carries on

in the wake of home

building a complicated house

a tree-house without a tree

finding places for everything

the song the stray cat the skeleton

The child’s soul musters strength

where the holes were torn

but there are no miracles:

even children become exhausted

And how shall they comfort each other

who have come young to grief?

Who will number the grains of loss

and what would comfort be?

– Adrienne Rich 1983