☀ Today's Poem: "An Essay on War" Jennifer Chang

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March 11, 2023

An Essay on War

Jennifer Chang

As I do nearly every night,
I will sweep the floor
when my mother dies.
I will miss her and
not call her
and little will change,
like the not calling. Every night
I think of her and don't call
because the thinking is soothing
and the calling is not. I sweep the floor
and think about what I've been asked
to write, an essay on war.
_________
"Most of us have not been to war," I begin,
"yet certain photographs
make us remember
what never happened to us.
Either our imaginations are marked
or no longer our own."
Dust dwelling in corners deforms
what I think of as an edge. There is the wall,
and there, alongside it, trails the dust,
stubborn, unrelenting. There—
a boy asleep on the beach,
a girl turned into flame.
In my mind I am at war
with images, my mother brazenly
unsmiling in a photograph
until the end of time. Her mouth's dark
red, a terrible ellipsis. Now, awed
by the body in time, she dons a smile
rinsed out like an absence.
I hate poetry. I hate art. One broad sweep,
and still the house will not be cleaned. My floors.
My nighttime habits. I write
without experience: "Dying is a fact
few of us can bear."
_________
My mother is dying and we pretend
nothing will happen. There
is the onslaught. Tiny particles
of my children proliferate . . .
our breakfast crumbs, my grief,
the nothing that scatters across the room,
that won't be swept away. I try
to not burn the toast. I try to not bend
to abstraction, this page
torn out of nothing.
What did you pluck out of the tree?
What did you put in your mouth?
My mother, who is dying,
tells me to lock the doors and windows.
Winter is coming. Every house
is a target. I live
in a house with a writing desk.
As a child, H's mother,
barely escaping the war,
left everthing behind—a well-stocked
kitchen, the first books she read in English.
She held onto her
small self, her only baggage,
covetously, terrified
in the backseat of a stranger's car
barreling toward a border.
Now in America
my mother is dying. She is scared of deer,
snakes, caterpillars, rats, and some
men. And windows and doors.
I no longer know where she puts the broom,
if she sweeps the house or
answers the phone.
_________
Who made this mess?
I write,
"The mother of all wars
is inside ourselves: I cannot decide
whether to speak or stay silent, or
I speak only ineffectual words,
the crackling sounds that trees make
on a windy night?" The season changes; again
nothing is coming out of my mouth.
I read a poem about a family
photograph, the son long gone,
the mother years into a second
language, second life. Her hair is a black wave
in a black ocean. I write,
"Why do we not think of this
as an image of war?" The daughters
look nothing alike.
I am leaving the door open,
the windows unlatched.
I sweep the floor as my children sleep,
I sweep out the leaves
they've carried into the house, every corner
the dust, the dust, the dust.
My mother was born in a war,
outlasted wars I studied
and wars I never heard of.
Never saw. My whole life.

from the book THE PUSHCART PRIZE XLVII: BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES 2023 / Pushcart Press

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Forward

"From Newcomers and Veterans"
Stephanie Burt reviews four new collections. "Karisma Price’s debut is rich with aphorism and rhetoric; Will Harris’s second book is a meditation on family; Gabrielle Bates’s debut borrows from fairy tales; and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collected poems sum up a career, and a life."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES

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What Sparks Poetry:
Daniela Naomi Molnar on "chorus 27 / Ojito Canyon / what consoles does wondering console"
"Poetry is borne of an elemental urge to connect with the deep time wildness of language. Like a poem, language is an ecosystem, made of the same stuff we’re made of, which is the same stuff the planet is made of. To speak a word, we move air through the fiery earth of our body, from the wet inside skin of lungs out through the watery trachea by the muscled earthwater of the tongue."

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