What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. Beginning, even, with the initial statement, Owen calls into question the treatment of the dead. Asking, “what passing-bells for those who die as cattle?”, he begins a discussion about what the men are afforded and not provided, starting with the respect of man. The word cattle, in reference to how the men have died holds a connotation of mistreatment and disregard; falling like cattle, they are not respected or valued but rather seen as necessary and replaceable losses, like cows to the cattle industry. The imagery of war, and the extent to which it toils towards disruption is depicted in the mention of the “monstrous anger of guns” and “stuttering rifles” building a evocative creation of the scene, in all of its intimidation and unease. This moves towards the the mention of orisons, introducing the aspect of divinity and peace amidst the storm of war. This comes into direct contrast with the stated sound of the “demented choirs of wailing shells”. This line affirms that those of the few sounds heard in the scene is that of a harmony of passing shell casings, this choral effort, however, is not to be confused with something of ethereal nature but rather demented and encompassing an evil and eerie spirit. A strong image that I noted was that of the boys saying goodbye with their eyes and not their hands. This scene encapsulates the sadness held by the remaining boys, evoking a stillness, it eerily lurks towards the unspoken, but unanimous unsettled nature of the boys. The closing statements of the saddened girls, works to express the manner in which war reworks the most vulnerable aspects of a person. Owen paints them in dark nature, stating that the pallor of their brows will act as the conductor of the young men's’ gloom. They will return home forever changed, their tender minds reworked, vulnerability reworked, and with each day a new loss. This, in fact, largely and truthfully depicts a common thread of wartime casualties, it is the loss of spirit that has the greatest effect.
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This poem, a joint effort between poets Dominique Christina and Denice Frohman, directly addresses the issue of the education, or rather the miseducation, of “black, brown, gay, poor, different, and other” students in America. In detailing the thought processes of the aforementioned students, alongside their circumstances, the two shed light on the consequences, ironies, and disappointments in the operations of the American education system. Furthermore, as the piece progresses, it acts to dissect the empty promise of the No Child Left Behind Act. For reference, the NCLB Act was set in place for the purpose of intended education reform; however, its application and focus on equality of standardized test scores, and not equality of opportunity, has seen to its failure in the schools. This poem has the marrow of this discussion, giving voice and purpose to the students that the NCLB Act failed.
The piece begins with the speaker entering a school, and being met by an armed officer. While, resource officers are a common staple and asset to the safety and security of the public school, it is this imagery of heightened security, shown in the usage of metal detectors, that sets the backdrop of the inner-city school. The police presence within schools of increased minority population is counter-intuitive, in that it protects the students but also procedurally perpetuates the school-to-prison pipeline of education by incarceration. This topic is subtly addressed in the speaker’s hearing of the prison built nearby and the way that they regard the students, as decorations, using their achievements as recyclable discard, their test scores as wallpaper. With their frazzled educations, the children's lives amount to nothing more than memorial t-shirts. This point is made by the line “draft them onto t-shirts, Sell your grandmother's dedication back to you for $14.99”, The idea is that the children are our greater profit in their demise, henceforth their education is seen as a financial burden. This is combated with the poet's’ recognition of the children's’ home lives, details that often go unwritten in legislature. The two affirm that the children are not helpless, but rather that their parents are, in fact, doing everything in their power to provide for them. They refer to a mother’s tireless work and a father’s financial sacrifice for the sake of the child, that the school says will be “left behind”. These statements build the shift of the poem as they work to reign the conversation into perspective. The NCLB Act failed because of misdiagnosis; the area of reform should have been opportunity and not proficiency; the students have individuals working towards their betterment but very little means to do so. The unfortunate bottom line is, however, that this reduces their lives to a “bumper sticker” and the cause for their success becomes commercial and compassionless. The piece comes to a close on the topics of miseducation, representation, and perspective. The children are presented with half truths and lies of omission with regards for their histories, and then chastised for inattention. The speaker addresses the disproportion between teachings of slavery and teachings of insurrection, the fact that the children are taught, often times, inapplicable information and expected to be excited. The topic of representation is addressed with the children's’ prototype of a “poet” and the way they are conditioned not to see the poetry in the hip hop to which they are culturally tied. The speaker’s detail of having read a book authored by an individual of latin descent, is one that puts into perspective the failure of the NCLB Act, and the affect it has on the students. As it was implied in the poem, underrepresentation is catalytic to the detriment of minority youth; miseducation is a noose, and the classroom becomes a poplar tree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxERHZWJwVk
In Dominique Christina’s “Mothers of Murdered Sons”, she starts a discussion around the lives of Mamie Till, Sabrina Fulton, and Leslie McFadden following the deaths of their sons. The connecting force between these women, is the high profile nature of their sons’ murders and their having been racially motivated. For reference, the sons of these women were Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, respectively; murdered at ages 14, 17, and 18, their deaths received national attention, formed chasms across color lines, and, as noted in Christina’s piece, incited riots at the hands of disgruntled members of various sympathizing communities. While the topic, in itself, holds a discussion that the world still manages to avoid, it was the nature of Dominique Christina’s narrative, and how she focused on providing a humanizing connection to the women who had suffered the greatest loss, that redirects the conversation of wrongful death and race relations, adding a new perspective and removing the stigma of a marginalization. The piece is conducted chronologically, and addresses that which ties these three women to millions more women, outside of the boundaries of creed or color. Utilizing the graphics of childbirth, she details the lengths that these women took to bring forth the lives of their sons; this juxtaposition of ideas highlights the manner in which their lives were valued in birth and seemingly discarded in death. She states that the bodies of mothers giving birth to sons “lose a lot of blood in delivery”, how their “bones go soft as yolk”, and how they are succumb to a “deliberate flood”. This emphasizes the supernatural power of childbirth, the manner in which women give themselves over to their children for the purpose of becoming more than themselves. The detail of the flood, is an allusion to the biblical story of the flood, a symbol of life after disaster. The religious comparisons continue as Christina compares the women’s “multiplying” to acts performed only by Jesus, himself. These were efforts in an attempt to present the ethereal nature of the woman, and the force of God that subsequently accompanies her in the flesh. However, Dominique Christina also works to humanize the women, while highlighting the dehumanization endured by their sons. The women, as she stated, felt pain, cried out in “prayers to nobody’s god”, were left stony, and left blood behind that never washed away. The last point is complex, in that it details both the child’s birth and death. Michael Brown was left to lie in the streets for hours after his shooting, one could imagine that the blood stains were stubborn to wash away. It is stated that the women “fought their bodies” for their boys, and implied that the fight never ended between boy and body. The end of the poem is more of an attempt at reconciliation than anything; in it, Dominique Christina seems to toggle, mentally, the idea of justification and coming to terms with the cards dealt to the women mentioned. She comes to question the role of a just god, and begins to form excuses for his being seemingly inactive during the time. She states that maybe he is a “charlatan”, an illusion of capability, and writes him into the stereotype of the absentee father in the lives of black males, playing upon the distant omnipresence of God. It was, however, the detail of God’s own murdered son that drove the piece to its climatic thinking point; Christina questions whether or not there is enough Eucharist, or sacrifice of the blood and body for the purpose of holy communion, in these boys for their deaths to matter. While they are not Jesus, they are still human. Does the benevolence of God only extend to his own son? The discussion in this piece was unmatched; providing a new perspective, it bound forces of the concrete and the apocryphal, highlighting that no matter what you believe these two topics are undeniably interconnected. This is “a metaphor for always”. https://jamilawoods.bandcamp.com/track/cancer-or-a-shark-in-the-sink
“Cancer: or a shark in the sink” is a poem from Jamila Woods’ digital album The Truth About Dolls. The piece shows the progressive effects of cancer on a young girl's family, as she sees the toll that the disease takes on those around her and later faces the possibility in her own life. The metaphor in the poem’s title makes a comparison between the scars left behind after a biopsy and the scars left behind after a shark attack; both are of the permanent nature, and come to signify a fight that one has endured. The line, “she hopes her breast will grow to be more like Grandmother’s dunes than mother’s sandcastles”, is yet another metaphor that Woods utilizes, in order to bring forth the details of cancer and its effects. The warning of “wet clumps of rock stuck in the halls” and the teaching of sticking her fingers in the sand in search of stones, relates the ideas, common to conversation around breast cancer, of the detection of lumps and the role that they play in diagnosing breast cancer, and the breast self-exam, a method by which the detection can be made. The details of Grandfather’s whale spirit, and his gradual decline in health, making of him a “bone sculpture under bedsheets”, a faint smile, and a shedding mane, further convey cancer’s place in the girl’s family. In this, the girl acquires a sense of paranoia, an overacting desire to evade the family’s persisting problem. She “combs the sand”,” fears the water”, “eats penance spinach and guilty chocolate”; in efforts to maintain her good health, she becomes slave to the “what-ifs” of cancer and volunteers punishment along the way. The line in which Woods writes, “her dirty dishes pile up beside the sink”, acts as an all-encompassing testament to what a life of fear becomes; here, it is detailed that the girl fails to live, in an effort to live. This piece resonated with me, because, unfortunately, like many others, cancer has acquainted itself with my family over the years. The progression, here, of naiveté to the untimely ushering of a young child into the gruesome reality of mortality is a necessary narrative; Woods’ portrayal of this idea was timeless and much appreciated. https://theoffingmag.com/micro/blk-girl-art/
By: Jamila Woods The poem “Blk Girl Art,” by Jamila Woods, is one that plainly expresses the power of words, as intended by the writer. In it, Woods details her desire to have her words transcend space, time, and scenario. This idea was one that powerfully resonated with me, as I enjoy writing and, wish more than anything else for my words to take every form that I cannot. The task, I find, when sitting down to write, is never the construction of word or phrase, but the construction of idea and impact. I’ve seen in all the pieces of literature that I genuinely admire, that words, if applied with the right passion, can assume any position that is vacant. Certainly, as yet another ever-evolving poet Dominique Christina states, “words make worlds”. Throughout the poem, Woods expands upon the specific positions she wishes her words would fill. She begins by stating that poems, communities of words, must be “eyeglasses, honey tea with lemon, and hot water bottles on tummies”; here, she is stating that poems must immovably present themselves as lens’ of clarity, instruments of focus, and a means of comfort and alleviation of pain. She goes on to say that she desires her poems to be the topic of conversation, something that can fill pews and harmoniously intermingle with hymns and the gospel. Woods desires words that are hot, words that are easily afforded all men, and words that can be used as shelter. Woods continues in stating that she wants “to hold a poem in [her] fist in the alley just in case”. This particular statement affirms the intended power of the words applied. Words of this nature hold a weighty defense against those who wish to harm you; the words, as she details them, are just as much strength as comfort. Her words serve as a shield against cat-calls, years of misogyny and sexist fallacy forced on uninterested women, like hands. With this, she wishes to show more of herself, her true inner self, in all of its unaltered glory and wonder. With these words, she will build up her sister and pay homage to the unprocessed and unhinged aspects of her mother; they will be: hot enough disrupt, detailed enough to instruct, fluid enough to carry forth, and still enough to soothe and transcend. Truly, Jamila Woods presented with this piece the sincerity of the artist. She details every turn that she wishes for her words to make, and in this text she lays the groundwork for those paths. http://www.wintertangerine.com/how-our-hair-got-this-way/
In the poem, “how our hair got this way,” by Jamila Woods, the poet reworks the story of Adam and Eve, in, what I perceived to be, an attempt to both highlight the race and qualities of the first man, and respectively the first woman, using her effortless humor and voice to further her implications along the way. Woods begins the poem with its title, “how OUR hair got this way”; here, her use of the word OUR suggests that the qualities that she expresses and the plight of the characters are qualities and circumstances with which she can identify, as a woman of color and a possessor of course hair. She goes on, in the lines, to say that, in similarity to the original text, Adam and Eve ate the apple, but continues stating that they were “immediately ashamed of the nakedness of their heads.” In this, Woods is weaving the idea that vanity, and not their committing of sin occupies their minds. This is just one of the ways Jamila Woods conveys ideas through the use of detail throughout the poem. She states that “Eve tried everything” to cover the baldness of which she was ashamed, even “flowers without names.” This is a manner in which she relates the newness of earth, which in turn heightens the severity of their sin. Their lives are so new, that the progress of creation is still underway and they have already sinned against their creator. As the poem progresses, Woods applies details that suggest the early formation of the patriarchy in stating “Adam said it was all Eve’s fault, for listening to that stupid snake.” This directly addresses the topics of submission, and roughly chauvinism in the Bible and the ways in which it is used to justify gender equality in today’s society. The climax of the poem comes in God’s realization and punishing of the sin. Woods details God pulling “the snake from the grass and stretch[ing] it so thin it broke into hundreds of tiny coils; this both relates the idea that the serpent was both present and absent, allowing man to hold the destiny/control of sin and obedience, and details the punishment bestowed upon the dissenting two, which is similar in context to the story of Medusa. Following this, there is a shift. The words that follow are spoken by God, or the god-like presence in the text. God is then said to place the snake, divided into his coils which are representative of hair strands, atop Eve’s head. This is significant due to its resounding power as a metaphor; Eve’s hair, stubborn and unruly, will defy her, demand her attention, will resist heat, referring to the reversion experiences predominantly when coarse or textured hair is treated with heat, and will defy gravity, growing upright and tall. The line most reflective of Woods’ refreshing humor, though, is the following: “God put some coils on Adam’s head too, but told him his would fall out over time, as punishment for snitching.” This affirms Woods’s implication that Adam and Eve, and thus God are in possession of qualities and features that may identify them as men and women of color. Here, Woods uses a phrase, with origin in ebonics or urban and cultural slang, to continue in this theme. She even adds a pun on male pattern baldness. Review of: “Frida Kahlo to Diego,” or “the ways my body feels empty sometimes” by jamila woods10/2/2016 In the poem, “Frida Kahlo to Diego,” or “the ways my body feels empty sometimes,” poet Jamila Woods constructs an emotion inducing edifice of words, around the subjects of infertility, inadequacy, the unorthodoxy of love, use, and misuse. In it, she utilizes systems of phrasings like,
"i am a vased flower tricking bees smell sweet, no pollen treats uprooted but he keeps coming back smelling of other lilies Always," to relate the well formed idea that this relationship, as natural as it may be, is riddled by the woman’s inability to sustain and give life, despite her sex. She is a woman, and her appearance and aura parlay that message to all who find interest in her, but at the end of the day she cannot fulfill what some believe to be the greatest function of a woman, and that is to bear a child. However, despite her being barren her lover continues to return to her; when he does return, though, he smells of other women. From here, the poem continues to relate this idea that the woman, because of her being barren, is empty, emotionally and in ability. Woods states that the speaker “rattles,” as things do when they are empty, or few in content. She uses a metaphor to compare her reproductive organs to an apple without seeds, a burrowing connector without the ability to multiply. In this, her lover simply uses what is left of her, “making a canvas of her neck and crushing her into a feathered mattress,” rather than acknowledging what she lacks. The poem’s title, connects the speaker’s emptiness to the possibility of shared sentiments between famous artists, and lovers, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Kahlo, as was the speaker, was barren as the result of an accident; she often made the pain and emotional scarring that accompanied her miscarriages the subject of her art. Kahlo and Diego, too, were quite familiar with the act of adultery and the idea of infidelity, often engaging in affairs. These undeniable similarities tie the ideas of emptiness to the life and times of the artists seamlessly, in a well constructed allusion. For all the aforementioned reasons, and a host more, this poem has become one of my favorites. Jamila Woods paints a beautiful picture with each portion colored by a different emotion, a different circumstance, leaving the reader with a mural of representative images. Each time, it seems the image transforms. http://www.muzzlemagazine.com/jamila-woods.html |
AuthorMya |