Golden Syrup and 3 other poems
A visceral surge of captive rage translates to defiant agency, confronting intersectional…
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From ULR
Issue 1 – The Beginning
A Woman of Earth – for Charlene Dumas
Haitian mothers, in profound hunger, give infants earth cookies: a desperate, bittersweet act of survival
July 15, 2018
Even now, in this age
of philanthropy, she
and her sisters eat dirt.
They buy dirt at market
where meat is blackened
by flies and rice, beans, and fruit
are only for the rich.
For her and her sisters,
and for their infants,
the yellow clay of Haiti
is like mother’s milk
(but it is not yet manna
from heaven): mixed
with shortening and salt
and left in the scorch of sun,
the cookies they cut from it
are almost edible.
For her, the cookies
are something less
than a feast, yet
she likes the taste
and her baby draws in
that bittersweetness:
for her and her sisters,
a gift of life. Even now,
their babies’ mouths pull
at their nipples and their own
parched lips are dry as dust.
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PART OF A COLLECTIONGolden Syrup and 3 other poems
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Charles Adès Fishman
Charles Fishman’s books include The Death Mazurka, which was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and In the Language of Women (2011), recipient of the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. The revised, second edition of his anthology, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, was published in 2007 by Time Being Books, which released his Selected Poems, In the Path of Lightning, in 2012. Charles is poetry editor of Prism: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators and, with Smita Sahay of Mumbai, India, co-edited Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women. His most recent collection is In the Wake of the Glacier: New Selected Poems (Kasva Press, 2018).