God is on our side … without a shadow of a doubt
they said and
no nay-saying her parents
her husband, her people
the politicos and demigods
their war-mongering
her eyes surveilled the warriors as
they cut across fields of innocence,
they stomped and postured
no Light shining from dark disorder no Joy in parting a sea of blood
in her heart: doubts
large, lively, captive
packed tight into small muscle,
specters beating at the walls
ribs
sore
eyes
burning
soul
aching
they know not what they do
God forgives them all, she was taught
But who will forgive God
– Jamie Dedes
Vasili Vereshchagin
The Apotheosis of War painting (1871) is by Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904), a Russian artist, who dedicated this painting and one other – Left Behind (a wounded Russian soldier abandoned by his comrades) – “to all conquerors, past, present and to come…”
WRITING PROMPT
There were several observations that contributed to this poem but, most of all, it was reading some comments on Facebook, especially this one: “If this is God’s will then God has a lot of explaining to do.” War, destruction, murder: God’s will, free will, or the apotheosis of nihilism (insanity)? Write something that – by virtue of its brevity – is pungent: a poem or perhaps a parable.
Please feel free to put a link to your poem or parable below in comments so that I and others may come read your work.
Dominican-American Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), novelist, essayist, poet, educator, a prominent critically and commercially successful Latina
“Even I, childless one, intend to write
New Yorker fiction in the Cheever style
but all my stories tell where I came from.”
Family Tree
It’s always a special pleasure to explore the work of those who dance on the hyphen, who don’t quite fit here or there and have to make something new out of their life circumstance. Unique qualities of clarity and color seem to come from the richness inspired by bilingual skills and from that uncomfortable hyphenated place with its singular view. It leads as it must for any observant person to the rigorous exploration of the human condition and of cultural and gender-based stereotypes.
” … definitely, still, there is a glass ceiling in terms of female novelists. If we have a female character, she might be engaging in something monumental but she’s also changing the diapers and doing the cooking, still doing things which get it called a woman’s novel. You know, a man’s novel is universal; a woman’s novel is for women.”
From the hyphen the Dominican-American Julia Alvarez birthed her first gift to us, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents(Algonquin Books, 1991), a semi-autobiographical young adult work followed three years later with In the Time of the Butterflies (Algonquin Books, 1994). The first book gave us the immigrant experience. The second established Julia as a writer who wanted to go a step beyond to bring to light and bare witness to the events – tragic, liberating and inspiring – of las hermanas Mirabal (the sisters Mirabal), known as Las Miraposas, the Butterflies. They were four sisters at the heart of the fight against the rule of the Dominican despot, Rafael Leonidas Truillo. He had three of the four sisters murdered along with some 50,000 other Dominicans and Haitians.
It’s not surprising that Julia Alvarez chose to write about Las Mariposas. She was born in New York in 1950 when her parents first attempted to establish themselves in the U.S., but she lived her early years in the Dominican Republic. She lived there until she was ten years old when her family was forced to leave the country after Julia’s father participated in a failed attempt to overthrow Truillo.
I think that one of the reasons I began as a poet, and poetry was my first love, in English, was because … I especially like cadenced, rhymed poetry, and poetry in English was a way of still speaking Spanish. Because it made language more musical, more cadenced…rhyme, of course, because every other word in Spanish rhymes with an “a” or an “o” ending, so there was a way in which, to me, English poetry was a way to speak Spanish in English.
Over the past twenty-five years, Julia Alvarez prolific pen has poured out fiction for adults and young adults, collections of essays and, of course, poetry. The Woman I Kept to Myself(Algonquin, 2004) is a collection in which she explores her life from the perspective of middle age …
We learn through what we love to love the world —
which might be all that we are here to do.
Meditation
There are seventy-five poems, each composed of three ten-line stanzas, a consistency that has inspired some mixed reviews. I find this style rather sophisticated and it lends cohesiveness to the work, which is certainly a celebration of the quotidian. Sometimes the conclusions are what is to be expected … nothing exciting, just life as usual; something accepted, not fought against. There’s a certain virtue in that.
We make our art
out of ourselves and what we make makes us.
Tom
Nigerian poet, novelist, professor and critic, Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
CHINUA ACHEBE was a Nigerian poet and novelist. His first novel Things Fall Apart(1958) is his major work and is said to be the most widely read book in modern African literature. He is considered the founding father of African literature in English.
Listen to a short interview with Achebe‘s daughter in pop-out player on BBC’s Witness. Published in 1958, Things Fall Apart “was set in pre-colonial rural Nigeria and examines how the arrival of foreigners – imposing their own traditions – led to tensions within the Igbo society. The book revolutionised African culture, and began a whole new genre of world literature. Witness radio program hears from Achebe’s youngest daughter, Nwando Achebe.”
Refugee Mother and Child Poem
No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother’s tenderness
for a son she soon would have to forget.
The air was heavy with odours
of diarrhoea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies. Most
mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then –
singing in her eyes – began carefully
to part it… In another life this
would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 