A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
From Leaves of Grass (David McKay, Publisher, 1891) by Walt Whitman. This poem is in the public domain.
1
And then he would lift this finest of furniture to his big left shoulder and tuck it in and draw the bow so carefully as to make the music almost visible on the air. And play and play until a whole roomful of the sad relatives mourned. They knew this was drawing of blood, threading and rethreading the needle. They saw even in my father's face how well he understood the pain he put them to--his raw, red cheek pressed against the cheek of the wood . . .
2
And in one stroke he brings the hammer down, like mercy, so that the young bull's legs suddenly fly out from under it . . . While in the dream he is the good angel in Chagall, the great ghost of his body like light over the town. The violin sustains him. It is pain remembered. Either way, I know if I wake up cold, and go out into the clear spring night, still dark and precise with stars, I will feel the wind coming down hard like his hand, in fever, on my forehead.
From Out-of-the-Body Travel by Stanley Plumly. Copyright © 1974, 1975, 1976 by Stanley Plumly. Reprinted by permission of The Ecco Press.
Today, November 28th, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I am staring at my hands in the common pose of the hungry and penitent. I am studying again the emptiness of my clasped hands, wherein I see my sister-in-law days from birthing the small thing which will erase, in some sense, the mystery of my father's departure; their child will emerge with ten fingers, and toes, howling, and his mother will hold his gummy mouth to her breast and the stars will hang above them and not one bomb will be heard through that night. And my brother will stir, waking with his wife the first few days, and he will run his long fingers along the soft terrain of his child's skull and not once will he cover the child's ears or throw the two to the ground and cover them from the blasts. And this child will gaze into a night which is black and quiet. She will pull herself up to her feet standing like a buoy in wind-grooved waters, falling, and rising again, never shaken by an explosion. And her grandmother will watch her stumble through a park or playground, will watch her sail through the air on swings, howling with joy, and never once will she snatch her from the swing and run for shelter because again, the bombs are falling. The two will drink cocoa, the beautiful lines in my mother's face growing deeper as she smiles at the beautiful boy flipping the pages of a book with pictures of dinosaurs, and no bomb will blast glass into this child's face, leaving the one eye useless. No bomb will loosen the roof, crushing my mother while this child sees plaster and wood and blood where once his Nana sat. This child will not sit with his Nana, killed by a bomb, for hours. I will never drive across two states to help my brother bury my mother this way. To pray and weep and beg this child to speak again. She will go to school with other children, and some of them will have more food than others, and some will be the witnesses of great crimes, and some will describe flavors with colors, and some will have seizures, and some will read two grade levels ahead, but none of them will tip their desks and shield their faces, nor watch as their teacher falls out of her shoes, clinging to the nearest child. This child will bleed and cry and curse his living parents and slam doors and be hurt and hurt again. And she will feel clover on her bare feet. Will swim in frigid waters. Will climb trees and spy cardinal chicks blind and peeping. And no bomb will kill this child's parents. No bomb will kill this child's grandparents. No bomb will kill this child's uncles. And no bomb will kill this child, who will raise to his mouth some small morsel of food of which there is more while bombs fall from the sky like dust brushed from the hands of a stupid god and children whose parents named them will become dust and their parents will drape themselves in black and dream of the tiny mouths which once reared to suckle or gasp at some bird sailing by and their tears will make a mud which will heal nothing, and today I will speak no word except the name of that child whose absence makes the hands of her parents shiver. A name which had a meaning. As will yours. —for Mikayla Grace
Copyright © 2011 by Ross Gay. Reprinted from Bringing the Shovel Down with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.