R – Lullaby for the Grieving https://ift.tt/bjWK6RS
Ashley M. Jones’ voice is necessary at a time when the federal government is seeking to negate the history of peoples of color, and DEI has evolved into a boogeyman for any ills in higher education or society writ large. In fact, her latest collection of poems, Lullaby for the Grieving, pushes back at the latter in its first poem, “What It Really Is.” Subtitled “an acrostic for america,” Jones writes, “Will / every lifted voice be silenced? When does a / theory become a threat?” If it isn’t clear by now, the acrostic spells out the words Critical Race Theory. The speaker, for whom “Cameroon is a whisper in my blood,” traces this threat back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, closing, “Remember the way my people were robbed of bone and breath? / You called it liberty.” Thanks to Jones’ poem, I found myself asking how anyone can imagine that a theory’s ideas, even one as powerful as Critical Race Theory, can be more dangerous than the event that caused “a wound, infinitely” in so many for so long?
As the first Black poet laureate of Alabama, Jones often confronts her mixed feelings toward her home state. In “I Think of You, Alabama,” she does not shy away from “our history [which] can embolden us / and move us forward.”Still, “When I think of love / I think of you, Alabama — .”But even this love must contend with violence:
the way you defy the harsh touch of man and bloom anyway. You rise up around your people and you show them strong and sparkling against any shadow, any chain.
Jones concludes the poem “imagin[ing] a future, Alabama, / and it’s coming, the freshest crop, / our most sacred harvest.” She prays, “May our hands be ready to pluck it, / let them be clean enough to hold it close.”
Such optimism, tempered by realism and emboldened with inner strength, is not easy to come by, as Jones addresses in “When You Ask Me From Where My Help Comes.” Her answer comes down to God:
my people were there, and they searched for God who they knew before the sin of those ships. God is God no matter the continent.
This faith is present even though “the face of God was shown to my people / […] some four centuries ago.” Those “four centuries ago” refer to the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which Jones brings forward, both in time and geography in a later stanza:
it’s true, my people saw the face of God and it looked like the cool river opening up to welcome their feet, to erase their scent as they were hunted by people who maybe were our great great great grandfathers and their sons, by the dogs which did nothing but what they were told.
From the perspective of runaway enslaved peoples, Jones moves forward in time once more, in the poem’s final line: “God sees us now. What will we show Him?” I’m reminded of Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy for the Native Guards” and its concluding phrase, “God’s deliberate eye.” Like Trethewey, Jones explores a painful history in “When You Ask Me From Where My Help Comes,” but she finds reason for cautious optimism in her closing line. Like Alabama, which draws her to it even for all its faults, she asserts here that though we cannot correct the past, we can make improvements for our future.
Such improvements lead to the final poem, “Imagine Us, In Love With the World,” which opens with hopefulness: “I want to tell you a story about love. About peace.” This poem, about her “parent’s voices / as they sipped coffee and settled into the morning / of their love,” finds the speaker hesitant to intrude. Instead, “In that stillness, that listening, I understood / how precious, how delicate it is to be alive.” This preciousness, the expression of the love between her parents, seems to have buoyed her all these years, for “These days, I hold that feeling / against the wound my living makes — .” These days “of politics making fiction into fact” are not as simple as those tranquil mornings. Instead, they provide “the rattle of danger / exploding from an angry barrel, / aimed at my head, my heart.” Nevertheless, they “[protect] me still, / coating me in my worthiness, / bathing me in their love.” Such a beautiful, poignant conclusion to a collection that sees God and love even in the most dire contemporary and historical circumstances.
I’ve merely scratched the surface of Jones’ collection here. I haven’t included many of her more personal poems, including her longest, “Snow Poem,” a ten-page work dedicated to her father. Even so, what I hope is clear from this review is that I find that Jones, the author of three previous collections, is working at her peak in Lullaby for the Grieving. This collection is filled with love, caution, correction, and ferocity. It exudes the voice of a poet confident in her righteousness, something we can all learn from.
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