In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.
Such pageantries of suffering, our little/lives rounding toward the dream of sleep and rest,/their waters all-forgiving…
O, let them come to the water: all who are weary,
let them come. It is invitations like this that I
recall from Sunday school, and the biscuits shared.
Then we grow away from them; too pat, too easy.
Are we forgiven all transgressions then against all
who heap scorn and who trespass against us?
A tit for a tat. Lex Talionis is clear and simple.
Pluck my eye, and I would make a clean bone
of your eye socket. Je me souviens. I will not forgive.
Did not Simon Peter sever an ear dear to Pilate’s
Malchus? “Upon this sword, Peter, I shall build
a Rock of a church, no perfidy shall prevail against.”
“Would he had said that, and not wait at Gethsemane,”
they now murmur, vanquished, huddled in vigil
to await a third day before the cock crows thrice.
The hill of skulls has since become a bastion of power,
even the mighty tremble before it. All because he
said: “Forgive them, they know not what they do.”
What’s left of this edict is now a little pageant
around empty tombs where the Empty Tomb
was finally sealed: He is not here! He is risen! He has left!
Little lives are left in a trek of remembrance. He is risen.
He has left. He will come again to judge the living.
He will judge the dead. O let them come to the water.
Where they flow far from the old Jordan river, they wash
the stain on every limb cut and every hand that cut them.
Our little lives will remember. We will forgive.