Angers

—–after a photograph by Sally Mann

Mine are named Emmet, Jessie, and Virginia,
bare-chested children
with a gaze like gall.

I step in close to photograph their bellies –
naked seed heads,
all the florets blown.

Emmet smashes a lens
into the petals of a rose
to ask if beauty can withstand attack,

his love locked
at an elbow cuffed with bracelets,
his limbs strung from twine.

Jessie grips a beetle in her fist,
daring weakling life to try.
Sick legs wriggle at her palm.

Virginia’s hands are empty
accusations of what she won’t receive.
River-cold, her anger

is to fear
as faith is to belief – radiant action,
call to revolutionary growth.

They are gruff as cherry pits,
shrapnel
looking for a purchase in the dirt.

I’m fascinated by Sally Mann’s photograph, “Emmett, Jessie and Virginia.” There’s a weight and challenge in the gazes of these children that belies their youth and makes me wonder about the relationship between innocence and anger. In rereading To Kill a Mockingbird with my high school freshmen last year, it struck me that children in the novel cry over injustice, when cruelty and prejudice are blatant and obscene. When adults cry, the cause is kindness, quiet grace. Children cry when the world is not as it should be; adults cry when, for a moment, it is as it could be. In this poem, I use the photograph to examine my own angers. Through the children, I challenge beauty to stand up and survive in the face of violence; I defy life to triumph over loss; I dare the universe to offer blessings not squeezed from stone. In these challenges, I’m working to understand anger as action, a force that might do some good. I don’t work fluently in anger as a medium. This is my attempt to grapple with where growth might come from in the form of seed after fruit is stripped and gone.

Photo credit: Jaymie Koroluk