[Hensleigh Wedgwood, A Dictionary of English Etymology, 1859]
Call us fish-meal.
We are no prophet.
We are no profit.
Our whole year swallowed,
As if by a massive maw.
What else could stomach
Our hearts, huge with hurt,
Everyone & everything hell
-shocked, as a sea bait-
ing its breath, its time.
As if to hold its whole self.
Lasting meant being separate
Together, proximate in our distance.
To be a part of the living,
We had to be apart from it,
Alive but alone.
It was death by survival.
The word atone comes
From the Middle English meshing
Of at & on(e), literally “at one,” “in harmony.”
By the second half of the seventeenth century, atone meant:
“to reconcile, and thence to suffer the pains of whatever sacrifice is necessary to bring about a reconciliation.”
There swims our one hope,
Unintelligible in its massiveness,
Like a finback dragging itself under.
& harrowed as we are,
We’re still standing
Gold as a beach,
Despite all augury, proof
That the meek shall repaireth the earth.
Call us Odd’Sis,
Wily as these miles of bloodshed.
Our gods owe men omens.
Answers, we mean.
We hide a battalion in the body
Of this poem, wild as a wolf in the woods.
Strength is separate from survival.
What endures isn’t always what escapes
& what is withered can still withstand.
We watch men mend their amens,
Words flapping against their hands.
Poetry is its own prayer,
The closest words come to will.
Come the tenth year in this battle,
We will no longer allow shadows
A free tenantry within us.
We would leap out of this night
Down-rushing on our head.
Often we cannot change
Without someone in us dying.
Call us an exodus,
Plagued ten times over,
For all we see is red.
Intentional language, like a poem,
Is to separate our waters like a gash,
To find the sea also grieving & giving
Enough to be walked through.
No.
We are the whale,
With a heart so huge
It can’t help but wail.
We can’t help but help.
If given the choice, we would not be
Among the Chosen,
But amidst the Changed.
Unity is its own devout work,
The word we work in,
That leaves us devastated to be delivered.
The future isn’t attained.
It is atoned, until
It is at one with history,
Until home is more than memory,
Until we can hold near
Who we hold dear.
What a marvelous wreck are we.
We press out of our cold
& separate crouching.
Like a vine sprung overnight,
We were reaching & wretched
Upon this mortal soil
& even so we are undiminished.
If just for this newborn day,
Let us take back our lives.