14. Khadijah Queen, poet

My Howler co-conspirators and I have added a new mini-ritual to our routine: weekly poetry. As in, Sherilyn recently got a book of poems called You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, and she had questions. To begin with, her questions concerned a poem by Victoria Chang, "A Woman with a Bird." Turned out, discussing the poem, offering our own disparate interpretations and thoughts, really enriched... me, anyway, and I'm certain the others too. Different insights, different things we noticed and appreciated. Poetry really should be a shared experience, I'm learning.

Today we met again, for our second poem, by a fellow Antioch University classmate, Khadijah Queen. I find Khadijah's poetry challenging. Beautiful; austere. Elliptical, with a resonant depth, not at all narrative. (Me, my poetry? Way too narrative. Why don't I just stick to prose?)

Fortunately, this poem wasn't difficult. We definitely had questions, but the beauty of this one was that it had plenty to hold on to even if some subtleties may have been elusive. 

Tower

A black snake plays dead
on the path between 
dogwoods and a meadow of wild
Ageratum, pretends to be water-soaked,
a fallen branch. Others lie
strewn about, their bark-flaked corpses no
mirage. All is well, say the midges, dragonflies,
moths, ladybugs, even the wind
stirring the leaves says to trust
instinct's music. I walk to unravel
panic's thousand fingers braided through
my insides—false roots. When I see death
I think lose lose lose
automatically. The tarot says let go,
change. I haven't read Gospodinov's
The Physics of Sorrow, yet; can only take
Sharpe's In the Wake in small doses.
I don't want to drown in ocean math.
I narrow my eyes to the scam, don't
move too fast, switch directions
then pause—turn back to see
what choice the snake makes sans my alarm.
In the forest, grief lives a new life
as devotion. Early August leaves play at color
before surrendering to both
man-made ground and messy slopes
collecting undergrowth. I wonder what's past
resistance to change, on the other side
of fear. If I don't look down, or walk away. Step
over the snake instead, realize
both living and dying require giving up.

Thanks to Kim for understanding the title, a reference (we believe) to the Tarot deck: the Tower, the sixteenth Major Arcana (following right on the heels of the Devil). In A. E. Waite's 1910 book The Pictorial Guide to the Tarot, the Tower is associated with "misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe." Curiously, the Tower is even worse than the Death card, which suggests transformation, change, new beginnings. The Tower is just catastrophic. And yet, once one has fallen from the tower, perhaps there can be an escape into freedom? Maybe the Tower represents an even greater transformation, a conscious reorganization of awareness?

I don't know why Khadijah settled on the Tower as the central metaphor here, but it's definitely interesting to think about. There are questions!