Emma Bolden: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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My Mother Says There’s Beauty Even in the Midst of Loss

 

but I am no longer listening, I am no longer looking

out of the car window & into the outside & all

its flowers, cheap party favors stacked up at the funeral

 

that the world is. As if a violet were God’s sign

that pain will be worth it someday. As if

on that someday God will make it all worthwhile,

 

living in a world where worth is based on pain.

If I could make the trees listen. If I could make them

understand, make them throw down their leaves & raise

 

arms bare as any human agony to the sky where

my mother says God is, where God stuffs his pockets

with our prayers like he’s hoarding candy, where sometimes

 

he unwraps a wish & decides that his answer is no.

It hurts me more than it makes me angry, the trees’

insistence on green. And after all beauty is nothing

 

like reason, nothing like a reason to believe the things we cannot

change are the things we have to accept. My mother drives,

the car moves over the asphalt some city put down to pave a way,

 

to roll its people forward despite what the ground had to say,

& above the sky gathers its blues like the face of a boy

refusing to breathe until he gets his way.

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Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull Press), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, the Bennington Review, and Shenandoah. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.

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                                                         The Wizard tree, Cathedral Woods, Intervale, N.H. 1900.

Comments

[Sr. Leslie]

Emma’s poem goes to that place where so many of us are…what we are feeling and what we/the world thinks we should be feeling…My mother says…but I am no longer listening..to her mother, to her God but to her heart…she confronts the pain, anger, hurt and loss…and like a child holds her breath until she gets her way but in that struggle will find her way…the poems pace picks up as the anger hurt mounts and bursts in the blue sky…in the face of the child….

[lally]

yet another remarkable poem and post, thank you emma and terence

[Clarinda]

This poem is a real life miracle for me on ways both artistic and spiritual. Thanks, Emma and Terence.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Michael.

[Grace Cavalieri]

How grateful we are for her Mother. This is a relationship poem with redemption.

[Eileen Reich]

This poem is special and meaningful. Close connections between mother and offspring are vital. There’s much to reflect on. I love this poem.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for your comment, Clarinda.

[Don Berger]

A stunning poem from start to finish, operating at such high emotional and intellectual levels, powered forward by its tremendous music line by line. A miracle of ear, heart and mind. I know I'll keep reading this song with heightened attention in days ahead, for strength, for thrill, for wisdom, for everything else. It's a poem to live by. I'm so glad you've shown it to us Terence, so glad you can sing this way Ellen--I especially love the gate that swings open in the first four or five lines, the startlingly beautiful reflection you treat us to there and then further and further on.

[Nin Andrews]

What an intensely moving poem! I love it all the way through, esp. love the ending--wow!

[Terence Winch]

Great take on the poem---thank you, Don.

[Bernard welt]

I’m always amazed when people can work out the formal issues in writing verse while communicating ideas and feelings, juggling metaphors, creating resonance of thoughts. I know I ought to feel like that’s just what we all do, but sometimes it seems like doing Wordle while riding a bike through a forest fire ….

[Linda Hickman]

As a person experiencing extreme loss at this moment, I can relate to this poem in ways I would not have understood three months ago. Thank you Emma. Thank you Terence.