Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Jelle Cauwenberghs

As the incoming administration builds its agenda of attack on marginalized people, on freedom of speech, on the earth itself, poetry will continue to be an essential voice of resistance. Poets will speak out in solidarity, united against hatred, systemic oppression, and violence and for justice, beauty, and community.

In this spirit, Split This Rock is offering its blog as a Virtual Open Mic. For the rest of this frightening month, January of 2017, we invite you to send us poems of resistance, power, and resilience.

We will post every poem we receive unless it is offensive (containing language that is derogatory toward marginalized groups, that belittles, uses hurtful stereotypes, etc.). After the Virtual Open Mic closes, we hope to print out and mail all of the poems to the White House.

For guidelines on how to submit poems for this call, visit the Call for Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience blog post. 

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Dark Is Not Your Absence
by Jelle Cauwenberghs

Only resistance. My silence.

I was a monk fish;

I dwelled on the fringe, my basking rock.

But on the bus I could not stop

staring at you, either broad or dented, no less real,

slanted across the ocean, your west side story

flapping in the wind, cropped coral

ghosting the sea, scalp

furied raw with worry, nag you said hag.

A bolt to the brain, stem intact and curtain-call.

You dazzled me. Your rosetta stone of cursives

drained me dry, drip-filtered;

I watched you, frothing roe, a frenzy

of floating bellies and torn fins splayed frondlike

against the nimbus of light.

In

articulate

ravage of a language walled up; trapped fire

with no escape and all these open windows

lashed orange. I felt the pull

of the undisturbed deep yet I could not look away.

I never could.

What could not be pared would not

peel and rot

and go to rest in glass canyons.

You will rise up until you speak blue

breathe and choke blue. Blue is the color of your oddysseys

and blue is the unspoken

flipside of your blind passion.

Blue is unstoppable and unidentified.

Blue is an ink cloud when it mingles with water

soaks the blouse you wear like a bruise.

Thunder singes

when it finds your spine and heals no more

like bone, or cauterizes so easily.

Blue gushes on the page so I have to.

The painter of your portrait but unvarnished

because it seems I care for you, femur and vowel,

act femme for you. Sing your blue boys and girls.

Blot your gaping wound, pour salt on your split

disloyal tongue, bridge the distance,

cringe, for your sake clasp the asp to my vipered breast; the dead

broken letters, scrolls and pillars, your shorn mane.

All marble can do is lie dormant

while we gasp

gasp gasp, care for flintsick earth, spin and bathe

in the living, and keen for the grassland

rebels in their snowy tents, the soggy pile of teddy bears

in Cleveland, the tides

with their strange slackjawed flotsam,

hurt like only a widow at night can feel the blood

shame of her cavalry sons –

her explosive belt of fallen stars, collapse and lisp

spit or pill wide-eyed fits or lose it completely but we won’t.

You won’t.

You are on active duty.

If you let it and you let it come close

with stinger and fang and clenched fists; then.

You will sit here and wait for loud brass,

heels clacking, our own music

all words that speak to us be

cause trumpets can softly scream

these shrill, scratchy clawing truths – remember? Only at night

at gunpoint, it seems, honey, we swarm

in rage and deliver scraps of dawn, dole it out – hope

promise, cross my heart I will eat the sour grapes of your love.  But please.

Gently approach, gray city friend.

Leave your guns and your safe cypresfenced towns,

I want to sit with you in the dark.

Walk me there.

Teach me again to pick shiver

ing butterflies by their frail wings. Not to pull

when nobody else is watching

because you know you can?

The surprise pain of elbow shock is the sentence

I ask for, again 

and again; because our union is vulnerable,

but this too can be pleasure, if you know when to release me;

this trust is my purple, bruised throat.

I undress for you. That is poetry.

To hope, if you will,

I must  lay my body on the line, my all 

and everything.

For you, I will break my vow, my silence,

lock arms and wade into the future, however frightening;

however unreal.