Requiem for Fathers Killed by COVID—for my father-in-law, Claudio Jorge Conti (1946-2020)
Fathers, taken inward, become language and melodies, their love an enduring heartbeat.
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From ULR
Issue 6 – Freedom
Cripple Song
Scratches, screeches, and grunts become a triumphant body orchestra.
December 1, 2021
“the eye must hear before it sees”
–Jean-Luc Goddard
The ruckus of crutches
on the gravel path
leading into school,
the screech
of a wheelchair
on the hallway’s shined linoleum,
the scratch of cast
against table
whenever you sit down
or rise to stand–
like this
we cripples sing
through the instruments
of our bodies:
through the flutes
of our braces,
the harps
of our prosthetics,
through the xylophones
of the apparatuses
that keep us
vertical,
and above all else
through the grunts
of pain
in every movement,
pain the wild baton
of the conductor
of this orchestra:
connecting
the sections,
directing the rhythm,
driving the melody
of our triumphant arrival.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONRequiem for Fathers Killed by COVID—for my father-in-law, Claudio Jorge Conti (1946-2020) and 4 other poems
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Seth Michelson
Seth Michelson is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor of poetry. He has published seventeen books of original poetry in English and Spanish, poetry in translation, and a bilingual Spanish-English poetry anthology. He is frequently featured at poetry festivals, book fairs, and universities around the world, and his work has been translated into many languages, including Hindi, Italian, Malayalam, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Tamil, and Vietnamese. His many honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lenfest Foundation, as well as prizes from Split This Rock, the International Book Awards, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the American Studies Association. He teaches the poetry of the hemispheric Americas at Washington and Lee University (USA), where he founded and directs the Center for Poetic Research. As a translator he focuses on poetry from underrepresented voices in Latin America. For example, he published the first-ever single-author book of poetry by a female Mapuche poet from territorial Argentina. He likewise edited and translated the groundbreaking bilingual poetry anthology, Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention. It showcases poetry from workshops that he led in Spanish for three years inside the most restrictive maximum-security immigration detention center in the USA for undocumented, unaccompanied youth. All proceeds from its sale go to a legal defense fund for incarcerated undocumented children. He welcomes contact at [email protected].