I am tripping in plain sight. I write poems about survivors. Here's one:

Never Can Tell
She wakes and feels this past

lurking beside her,

the ghost that will not fall behind,

pummeling, insistent.

She wakes and prays,

whoever is there to hear,

get me through this day.

I’ll not ask for more.

She wakes and dresses

her bits of scattered self,

hauling scarred pieces

to proper places, endlessly preparing.

At the door, she checks for menace

in hallways, scanning streets

for fleshy threats and phantoms,

seeking her whom she always meant to be.

Out the door,

she strides ahead

as if fearless,

limitless and ready.

She arrives feeling

unreckoned power, feeling this day

pregnant with difference, this day

ready, perhaps, for what yesterday was not.

and here's another:

Applause Is Overrated
Of all the workouts,

this run down by the

river of our downbeat,

this stretching of the heart

muscle, this reaching for

who you were, for how you

are now, for the nature of your

next epiphany,

is only the beginning

of me here thinking about

you ready

to play

the game you find

yourself in now. This is how

you fill the outline of all you

meant to be,

willful and wilding,

a minute late and a step too far.

You get up, and you go,

you go girl, live this day

and fuck the

deafening silence.

But I am not the poet I wish to be. To be that poet, I would have to produce a poetry of survival that is also a poetry of joy in overcoming. Here's one such poem by Audre Lorde:

The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors
I did not fall from the sky
I
nor descend like a plague of locusts
to drink color and strength from the earth
and I do not come like rain
as a tribute or symbol for earth's becoming
I come as a woman dark and open
some times I fall like night 
softly
and terrible
only when I must die
in order to rise again.

I do not come like a secret warrior
with an unseated sword in my mouth
hidden behind my tongue
slicing my throat to ribbons
of service with a smile
while the blood runs
down and out
through holes in the two sacred mounds
on my chest.

I come like a woman
who I am
spreading out through nights
laughter and promise
and dark heat
warming whatever I touch
that is living
consuming
only
what is already dead.

I do try to be that poet, one who can write poems of survival that are also poems of joy in overcoming. Here's one of my attempts to do so:

Wild Once and Captured
On hearing Annie Lennox

A whisper full of rhythms,
an echo raw with power,
a people spilling outward
in tidal flows of fever.
Here music summons silence,

here longing a language,
touching an allure,
dancing a passion play
and searching leads us
one by one

to stories all our own,
and to stories told in common.
Here smolders spirit
rich and ripe with promise,
peace and legend.

There drums yammering in clearings
where we are jamming with justice
who was wild once
and captured
and has broken out again.

But to be that poet, the one I want to be, I would have to go beyond a poetry of survival that is also a poetry of joy in overcoming. It must also be a poetry of commitment and of grim determination. Here's one such poem by Marge Piercy that I've posted on Outdoor Poetry Season repeatedly:

Joy Road and Livernois 

My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed 

till we heard blood dripping in the closet.
I fell in love with a woman who could ring
all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.
But she in her cape and her Caddy
had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,
a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets
to strut my meek ass. To quiet my wailing,
she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,
the white thunder rolling over till nothing
hurt but coming down. One day I didn’t.
I was fifteen. My face gleamed in the casket.

My name was Evie, we used to shoplift,
my giggling wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;
we picked up boys together on the corners.
The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,
sent me up for prostitution because I weren’t
no virgin. I met my boyfriend in the courts.
Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn’t

sell us whiskey. I liked to tote a gun.
It was the cleanest thing I ever held.
It was the only power I ever had.
I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.
A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.

My name was Peggy. Across the street from the gas-
works my mom raised nine kids. My brother-
in-law porked me while my sister gave birth,
choking me with the pillow when I screamed.
I got used to it. My third boyfriend knocked me up.
Now I’ve been pregnant for twenty years,
always a bigger belly than me to push around
like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill
on the blacktop. Now it’s my last one,
a tumor big as a baby when they found it.
When I look in the mirror I see my mom.
Remember how we braided each other’s hair,
mine red, yours black. Now I am bald
as an egg and nearly boiled through.

I was Teresa. I used to carry a long clasp
knife I stole from my uncle. Running nights
through the twitching streets, I’d finger it.
It made me feel as mean as any man.
My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.
All those hot night riding around and around
when we had no place to go but back.
Those nights we raced out on the highway
faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat
like shaken soda. It shot in an arc
when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,
the knife I showed you how to use still
on its leather thong between my breasts
where it didn’t save me from being cut in two.

I was Gladys. Like you, I stayed in school.
I did not lay down in back seats with boys.
I became a nurse, married, had three sons.
My ankles swelled. I worked the night hours
among the dying and accident cases. My husband
left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,
a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.
My oldest came home in a body bag. My youngest
ran off. The middle one drinks beer and watches
the soaps since the Kelsey-Hays plant closed.
Then my boy began to call me from the alley.
Every night he was out there calling, Mama,
help me. It hurts, Mama! Take me home.
This is the locked ward and the drugs
eat out my head like busy worms.

With each of them I lay down, my twelve-
year-old scrawny tough body like weathered
wood pressed to their pain, and we taught
each other love and pleasure and ourselves.
We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,
the little names. At twelve I was violent
in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,
a starving weasel, all teeth and speed
except for the sore fruit of my new breasts
pushing out. What did I learn? To value
my pleasure and how little the love of women
can shield against the acid city rain.

You surge among my many ghosts. I never think
I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-
working, attractive. Evie was brave,
Gladys and Teresa were smart. Peggy worked
sixteen hours. Pat gleamed like olivewood
polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.
I wriggled through an opening left just big enough
for one. There is no virtue in survival,
only luck, and a streak of indifference
that I could take off and keep going.

I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air
eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs
dangle and you jump and jump, where there are
more drugs than books, more ways to die
than ways to live, because I ran fast,
ran hard, and never stopped looking back.
It is not looking back that turned me
to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines
under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.
Girls who lacked everything except trouble,
contempt and rough times, girls
used like urinals, you are the salt
keeps me from rotting as the years swell.
I am the fast train you are travelling in
to a world of a different color, and the love
we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch
rages and drives onward, an engine of light.

But ultimately I am no more or no less than the poet that I am. I'm not becoming something different--in fact, in some ways, I am always and repeatedly something different; a poet, like all poets, of mood, of reckless joy, of fading courage, of gifts that come and go, and sometimes mute, sometimes no poet, at all. Here's a poem from that poet:

The Last Night
Heart, moon, breath and secrets—

jackpot of life and greater than rubies

for a silk-gowned queen—

invested long ago in goddesses and mysteries,

stories and familiars.

Infrequently, a god on this theory:

If one falls likely another will rise.

So jewel by jewel dropped or planted

like magic beans in wetlands

or in pools of courage

or in an eternity of fingertips

or in tears of fathers

as heart and moon,

breath and secrets.

Tumbling, reflecting,

life, joyful and ferocious

this heart splashes down,

sinking to the depths of Diana,

my fantastic huntress across eons

and cultures light years of difference

and no further apart than the space

between humans; which is to say,

sometimes no space, at all,

and sometimes like the deaf

speaking in lost tongues.

She is elegant in silk,

delicate in sheer,

fierce and opaque like darkness

at the end of life

trialing the tigress.

Oh, my incomparable beauty,

here to love every soul willing to love back.

And moon falls next to mysteries deep,

becomes this angel, David,

who also loves the young or old,

the robust and the waiting,

and gifts them with wild yearning 

for his touch,

and trades one for another

and another, until yearning becomes us all,

and the job is done.

Oh, my sweet, isn’t this a terrible delight,

the way the swamp gasses glow,

the way breath in aerosol gasps

becomes clouds of trilling vapor?

Stutter, speak, desperately sing then,

relying on voice and sorcery.

start and stop and start again until,

unhalted, shout savage, melodious joy,

defy the bully thunder,

contest the wild’s winking rumors,

confront its sly cunning.

Oh, finally,

my writhing, ecstatic secrets go further,

go firmer, go longer, go sunset to sunrise,

go sunrise to sunset, glow incandescently,

as if to banish trailing shadows,

as the dark of which we spoke

galloped after the huntress.

And next the tomcat rode

behind the young, infatuated witch.

What a story that one will be,

but this end arrives, leaving nothing

for now to say and surprise

that glory would last so long.

I’d bow but for the stiffness

overtaking my once moist and fertile self.

Still, my thanks.

You’ve been great.

You are great.

Do What We Do, Do What We Must

In all of the stories,

heroism, struggle,

and buried beneath,

the code words, the secrets;

we all are to die,

the tired old lesson;
the passionate words

sometimes read to a drone,
but words to read over
and over and over

again;

hear, children, the whispers,

you and you, one and two,

many and now,

and now that you’re here,

the meaning, the hope

buried, yet rising

again

and again,

the message,

a life lived in struggle,

oftentimes muddled,

occasionally clear,
always the goal,

listen at first

to the sounding of blows,

the bugles retreating,

the loss and defeat,

so many heroes,

lamentable deaths,

so many prisoners

and exile hordes,

eloquent obits,

men dreaming disturbed,

women bowed by their burdens;

stories sounding like heritage,

sounding like fate--

a blend of our courage,

seasoned by loss,

as though wounds and dashed dreams
are all of our story--

but here it is you
come to hear it all clear,

no defeat is forever;

yes, Espada’s jailhouse suffocation for barbed wire jumpers,

yes, Lorde’s children of war are aging and quiet,

yes, Lorca’s gypsies flee cities of musk and of sorrow,

yes, Hughes' poor boy weary, wishin’ to never be born,

yes, Ginsberg’s factories croaking in fog;

yes, yes, Forche’s Anna exhorting our silence,

our young ears to hear

the fight in the heart

of Crazy Horse felled,

the dream on the lips of Allende--

a leader may fall, but never the people;

harmonies of convicts chained in the sun,

safe houses for women,

healing and moving,

and the singing of blood,

of men dragged behind trucks,

hanging from trees,

the blood singing

catch!

here is the seed,

plant a new forest

that children to come

will find and explore

over and over and over

again.

Joy Harjo writes devastatingly beautiful stuff.

It is life affirming. Aspirational. Mythic.

Who would not want to be a poet if that meant one could write like Joy Harjo? Her book The Woman Who Fell From The Sky begins with a prayer, a tribute to Audre Lorde. I'm going to run the whole thing here, because there's no place I can see to cut it:

Reconciliation  A Prayer

I.
We gather at the shore of all knowledge as peoples who were put here by a god who wanted relatives.

This god was lonely for touch, and imagined herself as a woman, with children to suckle, to sing with–to continue the web of the terrifyingly beautiful cosmos of her womb.

This god became a father who wished for others to walk beside him in the belly of creation.

This god laughed and cried with us as a sister at the sweet tragedy of our predicament–foolish humans–

Or built a fire, as our brother to keep us warm.

This god who grew to love us became our lover, sharing tables of food enough for everyone in this whole world.


II.
Oh sun, moon, stars, our other relatives peering at us from the inside of god's house walk with us as we climb into the next century naked but for the stories we have of each other. Keep us from giving up in this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles.

We sing our song which we've been promised has no beginning or end.


III.
All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.


IV.
We gather up these strands broken from the web of life. They shiver with our love, as we call them the names of our relatives and carry them to our home made of the four directions and sing:

Of the south, where we feasted and were given new clothes.

Of the west, were we gave up the best of us to the stars as food for the battle.

Of the north, where we cried because we were forsaken by our dreams.

Of the east because returned to us is the spirit of all that we love.

for the Audre Lorde Memorial 1993

As her prayer unfolds, Harjo validates everything about us, even though we might gorge ourselves or give up "the best of us to the stars as food for the battle." I'm not sure that Harjo is really praying that "the spirit of all that we love" be returned to us. It seems to me that she's certain that is exactly what will happen. And she's sharing what she knows with us.

Harjo knows this sort of thing because she's always asking questions and getting answers back from somewhere. "Who invented death and crows and is there anything we can do to calm the noisy clatter of destruction?" she asks.

And, from precisely the somewhere to which I so recently referred, comes the answer:

When I hear crows talking, death is a central topic. Death often occurs in clusters, they say. They watch the effect like a wave that moves out from the center of the question. The magnetic force is attractive and can make you want to fly to the other side of the sky.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the gypsy Melquiades writes the history of the Buendia family, from its founder to the last Aureliano; writes in Sanskrit, I think, and then in code, writes relentlessly to chronicle the early history of the Buendias, so that he might catch up to the present and write the Buendias’ history as it unfolds, writes relentlessly so that he might go beyond the present to write the future of the Buendias as he envisions it.

Anyway, the Harjo I’m reading today seems to write our past, present and future in much the same magically competent way. But I can tell you that before this morning, I never appreciated Joy Harjo so much. Today I’m feeling her stuff deeply, not just in my brain, but in my skin and muscle, in my bones.

That sudden difference in my perception has seemed to come to me more often as I’ve begun to assume myself a poet. I was writing poetry for a good while before I experimented with the notion that I was a poet, and calling myself a poet for much longer before I realized how important other poets are to me, how much I like them, how much wisdom and grit and grace they possess, how much I want to be like them.

Maybe I had to call myself a poet before I could see that however great other poets are, they are also mostly people and can be understood on that basis. And so my appreciation has grown and I’ve bought some more poetry books and hopefully a few poets got slightly, very slightly, bigger royalty checks. One must hope.

But hope ain’t enough. Maybe the other lesson here is that the way to support poets is to first teach others to write poetry and find ways to nurture that effort in others until they begin to feel the swelling in their breasts that they, also, are poets and look around to see how many poets there are and get to hobnobbing with them, until all around it gets to feeling like a nation of poets.

Forget, a nation of individualists, forget all the old metaphors, a herd of whatevers, let’s us pass out the paper and pencils and pour or hearts out. Let’s build a nation of poets. Of good old ‘Merican poets. 

We all have a song inside. Poetry is a way to get to that song. The expression of those many songs taking shape as millions of pencilled poems on millions of paper scraps is the path to becoming a nation of poets. Joy Harjo's poetry is constantly uncovering songs and dance and drums and the profound music of silence, both inside and out.

The soundlessness in which they communed is what I imagined when I talked with the sun yesterday. It is the current in the river of your spinal cord that carries memory from sacred places, the sound of a thousand butterflies taking flight in windlessness.

                                 from Harjo's "Wolf Warrior"

Within that song was the beauty of horses. My son's name means lover of horses.

                                 from Harjo's "Sonata for the Invisible"

So the poets say, so the poets tell us

Dedicated to Marrianne and to Margrete who are in Cleveland, getting out the vote for Barack.

I have my own poems,
I have my heart, my moon, my breath and my secrets,
I have my love to babies,
And my faith that more will rise as my children rose,

But it is the poems of others,
The words that tear and soothe,
The words that rip and drip and feed and drink
That lift me up and grow me strong and race my heart

Further than I would have dared or dreamed to go.
It was Walt Whitman who waked me.
“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you,” he wrote,
“That you be my poem.” And I believed I could be.

Poet Essex Hemphill, smart and black and gay,
He touched me, too, and called
Sure black men to build walls of protection around
The beleagured in Anacostia and Harlem and the wavering poor.

Martin King reminded us that the great men of war
Spoke about peace as though they could deliver such a thing
By bombing us and killing us. Those who feel that war brings
Solutions to our problems “are sleeping through the revolution,”

Martin said. For every Viet Cong soldier we kill, we spend $500,000 to do so,
He said. And asked us how much we spend to educate a child or lift a sister
Out of poverty. And Audre Lorde, who reminded us constantly of the dead
We left behind and the dead we had yet to encounter, told us also about

The woman she loved who drew for her a bath of old roses.
And as Audre counted women caught in traps, one by one until
She reached the fifteenth one, the one with the courage to change
The question, Marge Piercy counted still others, living and dying

On street corners and discovered she was one of those with
The heart to endure and to love, “… the love we cupped so clumsily,”
the love raging and driving, “… an engine of light,” she wrote.
Just so did Langston Hughes remind us of the mourners, who

“Got up smiling, happy they were here.” And Dylan Thomas
Urged us to resist, “to not go gentle into that good night.”
How much did he charge us with, to waste nothing,
Least of all, ourselves? And having decided to live on,

How should we live? Anne Sexton tells us there is always more,
A for instance: the boy who finds a nickel and looks for a wallet,
Finds a string and looks for a harp, finds a golden key and
Unlocks a book of mysteries and fables and princesses and ogres.

This is something and there is more: the sunny days and open wounds
Of childhood, from where we came, troubled but standing,
And with Paticia Smith, “determined not to write a poem
Glorifying loss”

The uncontrasted gray of some days and other
Days of blood and tears and bursts of laughter.
Or as Ginsberg had it, “Candor ends paranoia…
Notice what you notice…catch yourself thinking.”

Of course, he adds, “others can measure their vision by what we see,”
Another way of saying that in our shared experiences and love lies
Liberation. Giovanni said that, too. “She’s our own star
shining from afar her life a beacon of who we are”

I am not a leader, but I know that there’s always another battle
And I hope to be there, following Martin, looking for ways that
Peaceful means can bring peaceful ends. In the meantime, as Giles said,
“There’s another Hellmouth under Cleveland,” and maybe we should go there.