I want to thank Fr. Staudenmaier for the invitation to guest edit “A Work Day in Hard Times.” As I mentioned earlier this week, my aim has been to explore what poetry might provide us in times of great uncertainty and division, and of great passion and importance.
One of the things I find most important about poetry is the way it can exist in the gaps between things. By finding ways to describe the indescribable, poems find ways to span the seemingly unbridgeable: real and imagined, self and other, known and inconceivable. We need to be reminded that is possible right now.
I teach Lisa Parker’s “Snapping Beans” in my poetry classes. My students and I think it is a poem about the gaps that divide us. We believe it is a poem about the bridges between us.
Snapping Beans
for Fay Whitt
I snapped beans into the silver bowl
that sat on the splintering slats
of the porchswing between my grandma and me.
I was home for the weekend,
from school, from the North,
Grandma hummed “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”
as the sun rose, pushing its pink spikes
through the slant of cornstalks,
through the fly-eyed mesh of the screen.
We didn’t speak until the sun overcame
the feathered tips of the cornfield
and Grandma stopped humming. I could feel
the soft gray of her stare
against the side of my face
when she asked, How’s school a-goin?
I wanted to tell her about my classes,
the revelations by book and lecture
as real as any shout of faith,
potent as a swig of strychnine.
She reached the leather of her hand
over the bowl and cupped
my quivering chin;
the slick smooth of her palm held my face
the way she held cherry tomatoes under the spigot,
careful not to drop them,
and I wanted to tell her
about the nights I cried into the familiar
heartsick panels of the quilt she made me,
wishing myself home on the evening star.
I wanted to tell her
the evening star was a planet,
that my friends wore noserings and wrote poetry
about sex, about alcoholism, about Buddha.
I wanted to tell her
how my stomach burned acidic holes
at the thought of speaking in class,
speaking in an accent, speaking out of turn,
how I was tearing, splitting myself apart
with the slow-simmering guilt of being happy
despite it all.
I said, School’s fine.
We snapped beans into the silver bowl between us
and when a hickory leaf, still summer green,
skidded onto the porchfront,
Grandma said,
It’s funny how things blow loose like that.
Lisa Parker
Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Director, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
313.993.1083