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It Bruises, Too

The haunting has killed before.
Find words to describe the stone
heavy in the bowels. Before us
are the disasters we make
of our lives. I am a clumsy
journeyman. You find me on
a road that curls across green
plains. You see me with my staff
from so many miles away. We follow
the contours the mountains
make of the road until, hours
later, after two light showers
and a burst of sunlight we
meet. I tell you I am doing
penance. I promise that these
words I am speaking are the breaking
of a long fast, and my voice
sounds alien even to me.
You ask why I wince like that.
“The silence,” I say. “It bruises, as well.”
And after the elation of this meeting,
we part, you towards the light, me
into the gloom you left behind.

More by Kwame Dawes

Talk

            For August Wilson

No one quarrels here, no one has learned
the yell of discontent—instead, here in Sumter
we learn to grow silent, build a stone
of resolve, learn to nod, learn to close
in the flame of shame and anger
in our hearts, learn to petrify it so,
and the more we quiet our ire,
the heavier the stone; this alchemy
of concrete in the vein, the sludge
of affront, until even that will calcify
and the heart, at last, will stop,
unassailable, unmovable, adamant.

Find me a man who will stand
on a blasted hill and shout,
find me a woman who will break   
into shouts, who will let loose
a river of lament, find the howl
of the spirit, teach us the tongues
of the angry so that our blood,
my pulse—our hearts flow
with the warm healing of anger.

You, August, have carried in your belly
every song of affront your characters
have spoken, and maybe you waited
too long to howl against the night,
but each evening on some wooden
stage, these men and women,
learn to sing songs lost for centuries,
learn the healing of talk, the calming
of quarrel, the music of contention,
and in this cacophonic chorus,
we find the ritual of living.

Kwame Dawes

2010

Requiem

I sing requiem
for the dead, caught in that
mercantilistic madness.

We have not built lasting
monuments of severe stone
facing the sea, the watery tomb,

so I call these songs
shrines of remembrance
where faithful descendants

may stand and watch the smoke
curl into the sky
in memory of those

devoured by the cold Atlantic.
In every blues I hear
riding the dank swamp

I see the bones
picked clean in the belly
of the implacable sea.

Do not tell me
it is not right to lament,
do not tell me it is tired.

If we don’t, who will
recall in requiem
the scattering of my tribe?

In every reggae chant
stepping proud against Babylon
I hear a blue note

of lament, sweet requiem
for the countless dead,
skanking feet among shell,

coral, rainbow adze,
webbed feet, making as if

to lift, soar, fly into new days.

Kwame Dawes

1996

Shook Foil

The whole earth is filled with the love of God.
     In the backwoods, the green light
is startled by blossoming white petals,
     soft pathways for the praying bird
dipping into the nectar, darting in starts
     among the tangle of bush and trees.
My giddy walk through this speckled grotto
     is drunk with the slow mugginess
of a reggae bassline, finding its melody
     in the mellow of the soft earth’s breath.
I find the narrow stream like a dog sniffing,
     and dip my sweaty feet in the cool.
While sitting in this womb of space
     the salad romantic in me constructs a poem. This is all I
           can muster
     before the clatter of schoolchildren
searching for the crooks of guava branches
     startles all with their expletives and howls;
the trailing snot-faced child wailing perpetual—
     with ritual pauses for breath and pity.
In their wake I find the silver innards of discarded
      cigarette boxes, the anemic pale of tossed
condoms, the smashed brown sparkle of Red Stripe
     bottles, a mélange of bones and rotting fruit,
there in the sudden white light of noon.

      How quickly the grandeur fades into a poem,
how easily everything of reverie starts to crumble.
     I walk from the stream. Within seconds
sweat soaks my neck and back; stones clog my shoes,
     flies prick my flaming face and ears,
bramble draws thin lines of blood on my arms.
     There is a surfeit of love hidden here;
at least this is the way faith asserts itself.
     I emerge from the valley of contradictions,
my heart beating with the effort, and stand looking
     over the banking, far into Kingston Harbor
and the blue into gray of the Caribbean Sea.
     I dream up a conceit for this journey
and with remarkable snugness it fits;
     this reggae sound: the bluesy mellow
of a stroll on soft, fecund earth, battling the crack
     of the cross-stick; the scratch of guitar,
the electronic manipulation of digital sound,
     and the plaintive wail of the grating voice.
With my eyes closed, I am drunk with the mellow,
     swimming, swimming among the green of better days;
and I rise from the pool of sound, slippery with
     the warm cling of music on my skin,
and enter the drier staleness of the road
     that leads to the waiting city of fluorescent lights.

Kwame Dawes

1997

Related Poems

What the Silence Said

Do you still believe in borders now?

Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.

You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires

travelled on wind you couldn’t see

wafting over the valley

and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill.

Did you not hear the animals howl and sing?

Or hear the silence of the animals no longer singing?

Now you know what it is to be afraid.

You think this is a dream? It is not

a dream. You think this is a theoretical question?

What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life?

The water grows clearer. The swans settle and float there.

Are you willing to take your place in the forest again? to become loam and bark

to be a leaf falling. from a great height. to be the worm who eats the leaf

and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky: are you

willing to be the sky again?

You think this lesson is

too hard for you You want the time-out to end. You want

to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends.

It can end now, but not in the way you imagine You know

the mind that has been talking to you for so long—the mind that

can explain everything? Don’t listen.

You were once a citizen of a country called I Don’t Know.

Remember the burning boat that brought you there? Climb in.

Marie Howe

2021

I Met My Solitude

I met my Solitude. We two stood glaring.

I had to tremble, meeting her face to face.

Then she saying, and I with bent head hearing:

“You sent me forth to exile and disgrace,

“Most faithful of your friends, then most forsaken,

Forgotten in breast, in bath, in books, in bed.

To someone else you gave the gifts I gave you,

And you embraced another in my stead.

“Though we meet now, it is not of your choosing.

I am not fooled. And I do not forgive.

I am less kind, but did you treat me kindly?

In armored peace from now on let us live.”

So did my poor hurt Solitude accuse me.

Little was left of good between us two.

And I drew back: “How can we stay together,

You jealous of me, and I laid waste by you?

“By you, who used to be my good provider,

My secret nourisher, and mine alone.

The strength you taught me I must use against you,

And now with all my strength I wish you gone.”

Then she, my enemy, and still my angel,

Said in that harsh voice that once was sweet:

“I will come back, and every time less handsome,

And I will look like Death when last we meet.”

Naomi Replansky

1994

What Comes

^{J’ai rapporté du désespoir un panier si petit mon amour, qu’on a pu le tresser en osier.
I brought from despair a basket so small, my love, that it might have been woven of willow.
—Rene Char}

to speak is not yet to have spoken.

the not-yet of a white realm of nothing left

neither for itself nor another

a no-longer already there, along with the arrival of what has been

light and the reverse of light

terror as walking blind along the breaking sea, body in whom I lived

the not-yet of death darkening what it briefly illuminates

an unknown place as between languages

back and forth, breath to breath as a calm

in the surround rises, fireflies in lindens, an ache of pine

you have yourself within you

yourself, you have her, and there is nothing

that cannot be seen

open then to the coming of what comes

Carolyn Forché

2020

poets.org

Poems

It Bruises, Too

More by Kwame Dawes

Talk

Requiem

Shook Foil

Related Poems

What the Silence Said

I Met My Solitude

What Comes

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Poems

It Bruises, Too

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