Poems of Persistence, Solidarity, and Refuge – Philip Metres

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.  ― Gwendolyn Brooks  

As we journey through political, economic, and global health crises, we turn to poetry to share truths that unearth underlying causes, illuminate impacts, and insist on transformative change. For many of us, today’s challenges are not new. The struggle of isolation, economic insecurity, inadequate medical care, deadly institutionalized negligence, governmental decisions that put Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, disabled, sick, and other structurally precarious people at greater risk are not new. Today, many more people are experiencing the vulnerability of these unrelenting issues. We recognize this opportunity for a heightened awareness of how our very survival depends on one another.

Poetry can help keep the flame of resilience, solidarity, and resistance alive in us. It can help us process and move through grief, anger, loneliness. Poetry can be a comfort when the most necessary actions are to rest and recover. It can remind us of what’s at stake, that our lives and legacy are worth the fight. As cultural workers, we know that culture shapes our political and social imagination at a foundational level. As poets, we can use poetry to map what is, what has been, and possibly, the way forward, including the reasons not to return to what does not honor and protect our lives, our communities, and our planet.

We asked poets to give us the words they chant to get out of bed, to raise their fists, to encourage their kin, to remind us, as this crisis does, that “we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” To read all of these poems, visit Split This Rock’s website.

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The Olive

by Philip Metres

زيتون

 

 

            (

 

consider the olive: it gnarls as it grows 

into itself / a veritable thicket / it throws

 

            (

 

up obstacles to the light to reach 

the light / a crooked path in the air

 

            (

 

while beneath our sight it wrestles the rock 

wrests water from whatever trickles

 

            (

 

beneath / it doesn't worry it looks like hell 

refuses to straighten for anyone

 

            (

 

each spring offers itself meat to be eaten 

first brambles / then olives

Split This Rock · Philip Metres The Olive Audio

Listen as Philip Metres reads "The Olive."

Poem of the Week: Philip Metres

              

    

 

 

Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker's Stroke  

How a Basra librarian

could haul the books each night,

load by load, into her car,

the war ticking like a clock

about to wake. Her small house

swimming in them. How, the British

now crossing the limits

of Basra, the neighbors struck

a chain to pass the bags of books

over the wall, into a restaurant,

until she could bring them all,

like sandbags, into her home,

some thirty thousand of them,

before the library, and her brain,

could finally flood into flame.

-Philip Metres

Used by permission.

Philip Metres has written a number of books and chapbooks, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), which was the winner of the 2012 Arab American Book Award, To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize.  He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Philip blogs at http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com.  

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all ofthe information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.   

Poems for Peace by Philip Metres

In this Poetry Foundation article, Philip Metres, who was part of a panel called “Peace Shelves” at Split This Rock this year, talks about the challenges of compiling a peace canon of poetry (as opposed to merely anti-war). For the full article, click here.

How to imagine peace, how to make peace? In our conversations on the Peace Shelf, three general subcategories emerged, though these were full of overlap and contradiction: Sorrows, Resistance, and Alternative Visions. It’s simple enough: we need to witness and chronicle the horrors of war, we need to resist and find models of resistance, and we need to imagine and build another world. Even if modern poetry has been marked by a resistance to the glorification of war, vividly shown by the World War I soldier poets and many others, the important work of poetic dissent has been, too often, via negativa—resistance to the dominant narrative, rather than offering another way.

Poem of the Week: Philip Metres

For the Fifty (Who Formed PEACE With Their Bodies)

In the green beginning,
.……in the morning mist,
………………they emerge from their chrysalis

of clothes: peel off purses & cells,
.………slacks & Gap sweats, turtle-
………………necks & tanks, Tommy’s & Salvation

Army, platforms & clogs,
.………abandoning bras and lingerie, labels
……………….& names, courtesies & shames,

the emperor’s rhetoric of defense,
.………laying it down, their child-
……………….stretched or still-taut flesh

giddy in sudden proximity,
.………onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine,
……………….as if come-hithering

or dead, wriggle on the grass to form
.………the shape of a word yet to come, almost
……………….embarrassing to name: a word

thicker, heavier than the rolled rags
.………of their bodies seen from a cockpit:
……………….they touch to make

the word they want to become:
.………it’s difficult to get the news
……………….from our bodies, yet people die each day

for lack of what is found there:
.………here: the fifty hold, & still
……………….to become a testament, a will,

embody something outside
.………themselves & themselves: the body,
……………….the dreaming disarmed body.


-Philip Metres

Used by permission.

Philip Metres is the author of numerous books, including To See the Earth (poetry, 2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (anthology of peace poems, 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (criticism, 2007). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be Abourjaili.

Metres appeared on the panels "The Peace Shelves: Essential Books and Poems for the 21st Century" and "Documentary Poetics" during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

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