***
Linda Hogan har rötterna i chickasaw-stammen. Hon är romanförfattare, essäist, poet och miljökämpe. Hon föddes i Denver, Colorado, 1947. Hon har en grundexamen från University of Colorado-Colorado Springs och en MA i engelska och kreativt skrivande från University of Colorado-Boulder. Källa: Poetry Foundation
To be held, by Linda Hogan
(From Dark. sweet. : new & selected poems. New York : Coffee House Press, 2014.)
To be held
by the light
was what I wanted,
to be a tree drinking the rain,
no longer parched in this hot land.
To be roots in a tunnel growing
but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves
and the green slide of mineral
down the immense distances
into infinite comfort
and the land here, only clay,
still contains and consumes
the thirsty need
the way a tree always shelters the unborn life
waiting for the healing
after the storm
which has been our life.
**
Det andra diktexemplet har en mycket stark avslutning där hon tar upp sina förfäders placering i reservat.
Walking with my father, by Linda Hogan
(From Dark. sweet. : new & selected poems. New York : Coffee House Press, 2014.)
In the dark evening, my father and I
walk down the road to the old house
where my grandmother lived,
and we see through the door an old woman's feet
lifted up, tired, on a footstool,
still in her thick stockings,
the feet with legs and stockings
looking just like Grandma's
after bearing nine children who lived,
standing, working all day,
the kind of woman who made stacks of toast, platters of eggs
for all of us each hot morning,
did laundry, then lunch,
supper, and worked with the animals
or cleaning fish
the rest of the day.
I want to go open that door as I did
so many times in the past, remembering
not to slam the screen, as everyone would yell
although I am now also older and finite,
the seams of myself coming apart.
How I wish I could go to that woman
with her legs up and rub her feet,
put liniment on her legs.
Years have passed through the doors
of that house, of memory, doors of the past
and my father's eyes
are sad, looking in,
his own memories, not mine,
thinking maybe of his mother
and some of his old belongings,
the stolen Colt of his own father,
the bracelet he gave me with his R.A. number.
Her memories are unremembered,
as my grandfather's,
as those before them,
I think of what this poem is about,
only partly about memory,
our many losses.
And walking with my father
I walk with my grandparents,
among the first to be numbered:
#1556,
#1555.
***
Kyle Dargan föddes i Newark, New Jersey. Han tog sin BA från University of Virginia och UD från Indiana University, där han var en Yusef Komunyakaa-stipendiat och poesiredaktör för Indiana Review. Han är författare till fyra diktsamlingar: The Listening (2004), som vann Cave Canem Prize; Bouquet of Hungers (2007), som tilldelades The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry; Logorrhea Dementia (2010) och Honest Engine (2015). Källa: Poetry Foundation
Från den sistnämnda boken har jag valt två dikter.
O, Ghost / by Kyle G. Dargan
(From Honest engine. University of Georgia Press, 2015.)
O, Ghost, you methane mirage, blue
burning at the foot of my basement stairs
ignited nightly by the haunting’s hunt.
I have read you come hungry—a gullet
straw-thin, belly like a cavern, you vase
with limbs. I place cut asters down your throat.
They fall through you, to the floor. I pour
rainwater down your throat. It rises.
You want a Michelob. You want a good fuck
or some crystalline spark injected through
your phantom veins, but, Ghost, I am
the wrong dealer for you. I’ve read
parables suggesting truth is all you’ll digest
At this point. I am only a heartbeat,
a sentient sack of blood who expects
night will give way to sunlight
as it has done each day of my life.
I cannot call that truth. Ghost, I cannot
feed you, but I’ll tongue a woman wildly
for you. I’ll feed pints of ale across my lips.
I’ll rub my nerves raw with recklessness,
reminded now that this is all we ever were:
wrecks. Pity all who think they are heavenly
bodies marooned here on earth. We smolder.
We expire in trills of smoke. Ghost,
What arrogance earned you your body
of cold, ceaseless flame? Were my touch
so true, I would extinguish you.
**
A house divided, by Kyle G. Dargan
(From Honest engine. University of Georgia Press, 2015.)
On a railroad car in your America,
I made the acquaintance of a man
who sang a life-song with these lyrics:
“Do whatever you can/ to avoid
becoming a roofing man.”
I think maybe you’d deem his tenor
elitist, or you’d hear him as falling
off working-class key. He sang
not from his heart but his pulsing
imagination, where every roof is
sloped like a spire and Sequoia tall.
Who would wish for themselves, another,
such a treacherous climb? In your America,
a clay-colored colt stomps, its hooves
cursing the barn’s chronic lean.
In your America, blood pulses
within the fields, slow-poaching a mill saw’s
buried flesh. In my America, my father
awakens again thankful that my face
is not the face returning his glare
from above eleven o’clock news
murder headlines. In his imagination,
the odds are just as convincing
that I would be posted on a corner
pushing powder instead of poems—
no reflection of him as a father nor me
as a son. We were merely born
in a city where the rues beyond our doors
were the streets that shanghaied souls.
To you, my America appears
distant, if even real at all. While you are
barely visible to me. Yet we continue
stealing glances at each other
from across the tattered hallways
of this overgrown house we call
a nation—every minute
a new wall erected, a bedroom added
beneath its leaking canopy of dreams.
We hear the dripping, we feel drafts
wrap cold fingers about our necks,
but neither you or I trust each other
to hold the ladder or to ascend.
