Tag: ethical witnessing
-
Reclamation Song
Reclamation Song emerged from my refusal to inherit grief as myth. I wanted to write a poem that dismantled lineage without dramatizing it—where the speaker doesn’t mourn but revises. The tree is not metaphor; it’s archive, reliquary, and burden. Each stanza performs a gesture: excavation, disinheritance, refusal, and rebuilding. I invoked Tsi’yugunsini to align with…
-
The Shaker Chair
“The Shaker Chair” began as a meditation on absence—how sacred objects lose their purpose when belief erodes. I was drawn to the Shaker chair as a symbol of readiness, reverence, and silence. The poem inverts that grace, replacing angelic possibility with corporeal desecration. It’s not a condemnation—it’s a witnessing. The man who occupies the chair…
-
Someone Passes at 8 a.m. and the Birds Do Not Sing
This poem began as a refusal. I wanted to interrogate the cultural impulse to romanticize death—to project meaning onto birdsong, rain, and sunlight in the wake of loss. The poem dismantles these gestures, exposing how metaphor often obscures rather than reveals. It’s not an elegy. It’s a critique of elegy. The theme is not grief…