Exhortation for any Innocence that Remains
Warning bell of a child, still, unwrung
as yet by what a tongue can hold, or what
can hold a tongue: let yourself be small.
Spent match, fire in another man’s belly,
word-weight in a dead language, rise up!
O exhale-born, o hymn-child, humming home
bearing your own song, held word (life
meaning what’s said, what’s said meaning
what’s heard), rise quietly, like heat
in a cheek burned first by turning. Warning
bell rung, unring yourself, become the truth
that binds another’s tongue, enter first
into any room as the haunt in a quarry’s eyes,
as a threat felt from behind. Dark child, planet
eclipsed, waiting like a star waits out the day,
let nightfall swallow all the drowning light.
Come forth, and when you come, come as you are,
small and deadly, thrust Godward like a fist.
*
Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, ONE ART, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.
“Enter first into any room as the haunt” – So great.
I love the rhythm in this poem. There’s such devastating threat held in tension, which feels so right for this time.
enter first
into any room as the haunt in a quarry’s eyes,
as a threat felt from behind. Dark child, planet
I love your poetry. Currently, I am reading your book. The quarry’s eyes, the fist appearing the end….
This poem really sticks with me – the final image of an innocence that may not be an innocence at all, maybe a righteousness? which is another kind of innocence. Unless, I’m misreading this, it has a very resonant parallel with “Stranger in the Village” by Baldwin “…anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster” …the innocence of this poem seems the opposite of that. Baldwin presaged the “innocence” in the brutishness of MAGA. This speaker calls for righteousness and resolve.