/emotions tough to navigate/
for the late Adrienne Rich
You weren't surprised when suicide
abandoned you to sympathize
with widows across centuries
who bore responsibilities
for men whose deaths the children cried.
There was no need to fantasize
what poets have mythologized
about male martyrs' histories.
You weren't surprised.
He shot himself before sunrise
near your old cabin full of lies.
A broken man with mysteries
that you unmasked dispassionately
exposing Patriarchy's guise.
You weren't surprised.
*
A scale too large to contemplate
emotions tough to navigate
dysfunction everywhere you looked
the undermining current took
a turn away from men and hate.
A mother's need to consecrate
love for sons with open fates.
Expanding restlessness forsook
a scale too large.
A crossroad on an interstate
unclear about which turn to take
abandon children for a book
of female pain and fury cooked
in a green pot with boys impaled.
A scale too large.
*
I need to talk with you, mother.
“You're destined to call me 'Other',
speaking the oppressor's language,
turning women's brains into cages
constraining rages that bother.”
I am a son with no father,
a boy intending no harm here,
trying to navigate mazes.
I need to talk with you.
“I heard a robin today near
the blossoming lilac tree where
your father paused mindful of pages
left unread and unwritten, aged
before realized, ending there.”
I need to talk with you.
Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Asheville, NC. As a woman of color, she writes about identity and power. Ofi Literary Magazine, Transnational, Bluestem,The Review Review, Mount Island, and 34th Parallel are among the venues her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in, and her collection, Ferguson And Other Satirical Poems About Race, won the 2015 Bitchin' Kitsch Chapbook Competition and is in press. In the 1970s, Clara studied with Adrienne Rich and has studied recently with the poets Meghan Sterling and Eric Steineger.
