“This is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before.” – Maya Angelou
This month, on November 6th, the citizens of the United States elected their next president. On November 8th, I left the country. I left my country for a planned trip to Central America.
In Central America, in the Caribbean Sea, I float. My heavy heart presses my body downward. Salted swells pitch me up. In a lullaby of lilting waves my body hovers, held in a melody of warm blue while at home a national symphony swells in a minor chord threatening to wreak major havoc. Havoc, what an odd word: n. widespread destruction; great confusion or disorder; v. lay waste to; devastate. Originally used in the phrase “cry havoc”: to give an army the order havoc. The order for plundering.
Can rights be plundered? Can freedom? “First they came for”. . . . by now you’ve read the poem. Reread the poem. Red poem. Heart’s blood. Lifeblood. Right to live, to love, freedom to be one’s own self, freely.
This month I read Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, by Heidi Czerwiec [sir wick]. So it follows I should be able to impart to you what a lyric essay is, what enables an essay to not just contain lyricism, but be labeled lyric. There is “a focus on patterning, and on resonances of sound and silence and image on the level of the language.” (Czerwiec 2024, 2) Patterns obvious, hidden, uncovered. Resonances of rhythm and repetitions. There is less narrative and more watching the author’s thought process unspool on the page, melody in the making. In writing, meaning is completed by the reader with their subjective associations, and this is more true in lyric work.
In the sea, the surge tugs me away from shore. I trust in what will happen next. I relax as the shore recedes. With the incoming wave I cup my hands, spiral my arms, and kick with all my might. I write because writing might be enough of a buoy to hold up my weighted heart.
This month back at home without the warm sea to resist my sinking, the heaviness in my body drops onto the page, sprawls into sentences, sayings, screams, gull cries distant in the spiral of my inner ear. I dream of salted inhales and spouted exhales. I seek the blue in sky smudged with clouds, underlined in fog, accented with snow-topped mountains.
This month I consider the uplift to be gained in advocating for “the love of,” instead of or in addition to, “the fear or hate of.” I consider. Patterns. Routine. Labyrinth. Going into and withdrawing from the page, the day, a song to lull you back, and to sing you out of bed and into the sea swell of your day.
Your day. Our day. This day.
P.S. To read is to gain understanding. Three lyric essays mentioned in Czerwiec’s book: Brian Doyle’s “Leap,” Kathy Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” Nicole Walker’s “Fish.” There are book-length lyric essays: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Heather Christle’s The Crying Book. Anthologies:A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, edited by Randon Billings Noble and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins, edited by Noë Bossiere and Erica Trabold.
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