A Picture that Wrote a Poem
I FOUND THIS clear-as-a-bell lyric prose poem in Poetry Daily’s postings yesterday. The poem by Vievee Francis, first published by Poetry Daily this year, has been chosen in this year’s Best American Poems. And one’s very glad, in its modesty, it made it onto that grand stage.
It’s an ekphrastic poem, I guess, responding as it does, personally, to a photograph. As it happens, the two figures in the photograph—taken in 1965 on the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, and met with violence by the State governor—became famous. One is the white poet Gallway Kinnell, who learned about privilege that day at the end a white policeman’s stick; the other, consoling him, is a black activist leader, Harriet Richardson, who went on to a position of great significance in the Civil Rights movement.
But that day—and this is the poem’s point, and what the image captures—they were a man and a woman, and what she showed was compassion, and courage in compassion, and what his face shows is the bewilderment of learning a hard truth in a hurry and discovering a softer, more sustaining truth, just as suddenly. What they both did that day was what is wanted of us: they showed up in the face of tall odds and hateful orthodoxies. They cared, notwithstanding. And so did the poet and her husband, on the evidence of the poem, in their lives, and so did their two families—enacting love against fear.
It’s a wonderful poem, which for my money practises, in its restraint and humanity, the deeper speaking, the quieter voicing, the smaller gestures, in which poetry enacts and incites its revolutions. For the revolutions poetry starts are in the heart; after that, and only after that, houses come tumbling down.
So, first the poem, and then the picture that, trhough the life and hand of Vievee Francis, wrote it.
1965: Harriet Richardson Wipes Galway Kinnell’s Face after State Troopers Beat Him with a Billy Club
Vievee Francis
for Matthew
In Selma that day. The photograph. It is the way she is looking at him. Not his name. His pallor. Not the city, nor the event, not even the blood on his neck. When I saw the picture I realized someone cared enough to take it. There was only one lens. Then, the entire world wasn't always watching. She pressed that cloth to his neck as intimate as a kiss whispered into the channel of an ear. Spontaneously. Sudden and overwhelming as a father's embrace after a father's failure to embrace. I was two years old. It was before I knew what I was born into. It would have been illegal for me to have married my husband. My husband stares at the picture, but a man so compassionate cannot easily take in its lack. It takes the violating or the violated to know. You know why Galway was there. Why pretend? The reward of courage is this: my husband told his parents he would marry me. Period. He expected his parents to live up to the values they espoused. They have. If I cry, my blue-eyed father-in-law—whose father left Germany in the nascent rise of Hitler—cries. Galway's eye to Harriet's brown as mine. Look at the way he looks at her. Like a sun rising twice to be Galway that day, looking up in the face of the tender after terror. See, the grace of gratitude. He being there. She being her.
https://mountainx.com/news/tuesday-history-when-a-poet-discovers-the-segregated-south/
