From the new and much-needed anthology, Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022). I’m in the process of reviewing this timely and potent collection of poems and in the midst of this pandemic of racism in our country Dawes’ words—directed at America’s Shakespeare, August Wilson—speak beauty to violence.
“You, August, have carried in your belly/every song of affront your characters/have spoken, and maybe you waited too long to howl against the night,/but each evening on some wooden/stage, these men and women/learn to sing songs lost for centuries,/learn the healing of talk, the calming/of quarrel, the music of contention,/and in this cacophonic chorus,/we find the ritual of living.”
That stanza doesn’t even need unpacking. Every Black American in this country has a song lost when an angry white man silences it. We will find the ritual in living—again—after this recent attack on the sacredness of human life. Poetry, song, art, and story heal. Dawes, earlier in the poem, asks, “who will let loose/a river of lament,/find the howl of the spirit…” May we somehow come together in the river of lament.