After Joy Harjo: Poetry as Ceremony

A rough poem for the drowning

One of the reasons I originally wanted to start a newsletter was to be able to share unpolished poems, the fresh-from-the-heart sort that are still dripping with relevance, not yet mummified by the dry air of editing.

It’s all well and good spending months polishing a poem about a timeless scenario and then months more waiting for a response (usually a rejection) from lit mags. But if the topic you want to write about is currently unfolding, that infuriatingly snail-like pace doesn’t fly. (Of course it doesn’t. Stop mixing metaphors.)

And since art has great potency when it responds to real situations, infused with the artist’s desire to make a positive impact, my view is that it’s better done – and in your inbox – than perfect.

So waking at 2am, having crashed out reading Joy Harjo’s brilliant poetry collection ‘Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings’, and thinking of Muslims facing boycotts and lynchings in an increasingly Islamophobic India, and stories coming out of Morocco of a teacher finding every single one of her students has died in last week’s earthquake, I felt the need to write a poem that is more than simply a lament, but also an intentional act, a means of claiming oxygen amid the suffocation of sadness.

It’s rough and barely edited, but this one is not destined for a lit mag; it wants to be read now.

If you feel to donate something, please see the brilliant work being done by my dear friend Nora Fitzgerald’s non-profit Amal in Marrakesh, which has been making thousands of meals for earthquake survivors and distributing tents (donation link here). And if you know of trustworthy NGOs working to advocate for Indian Muslims please do comment.

Thankyou for reading.

I Send This Poem

“Every poem is an effort at ceremony.” – Joy Harjo

It slithers over the skin, 
their hatred. Down the nape.
A known irritant with a thousand clinical studies:
taste of lead on teeth.

A scalpel tip traces the shape of a body
from a map – one flick and it’ll float away,
red vinyl fish on a palm: curl up in the heat
and you’re It.

This is not the sudden hiccup of Earth
that swallows a hundred schools whole, the
gravity yawn that sends women howling into 
yellow mountains, wrapped, alone – this is a
blank face peering through a river’s membrane
watching you flail. Foot on your chest.

I write to lay resin over coals, carry
rememorising smoke into musty halls where
anaerobic parasites cringe over cartography tables.
The smoke is filled with light receptors, like
the streak between their brain stems and coccyx,
shrieking in spite of them, inside them, for cleanness.

I send this poem as a thread to catch the
unwholed pieces, the ones who have to prove
they belong in their grandparents’ homes –

I send this poem in the shape of an origami crane
that actually flies, in a sphere of silence, 
not of blown eardrums but the delayed 
                          inhalation      of the drowning.

I want you to know that a poem is an oxygen tank
that intentions can be folded to fit any pocket
and the first way into humanity is to be 
happy for another –

		this is what sticks in their throats:
		that we can still be happy

and if you unfold this poem it is a blessing on 
the fissured plains where joy can grow

and I send this poem to the paper towers of enmity
as an exhalation for every one
who dares not breathe.