Besides making the best crab cakes in world and winning the
Nobel Prize for astonishingly graceful yet epic prose, Toni Morrison is a
consummate poet. On May 26, 2006, friends and family gathered to celebrate her
retirement from Princeton University. Some of us had been President of the
United States, some us were legendary performers and some of us had accosted
her with so many questions as an adolescent that she never forgot us. As
selected guests were each given time to discuss an aspect of her colossal
artistry, a colleague, Paul Muldoon, got the honor of speaking in her poetry. Composed
almost exclusively to be set to music, Morrison’s poems are highly imagistic
and of the natural world. Like her novels, there is always a [sic] historic
lesson. One of my favorites is “I Am Not Seaworthy”, part of the song cycle
“Honey and Rue”, commissioned by the soprano Kathleen Battle for a Carnegie
Hall performance.
I Am Not Seaworthy
I am not seaworthy.
Look how the fish mistake my hair for home.
I had a life, like you. I shouldn’t be riding the sea.
I am not seaworthy.
Let me be earthbound; star fixed
Mixed with the sun and smacking air.
Give me the smile, the magic kiss
To trick little boy death of my hand.
I am not seaworthy.
Look how the fish mistake my hair for home.
One
of the great moments of my life was sitting at her knee, in Saint Mark’s Church
in-the-Bowery, eating gumbo. She critiqued our lunch by adding, “It’s all right
but it’s not as good as my mama used to make!” In contrasting her poems to
those written by some of her highly-overrated contemporaries, a similar chord
is struck in me: they’re all right but not as good as Toni Morrison makes.
"I Am Not Seaworthy", ©Toni Morrison, 1995
