Ariel's Song
Jan. 2nd, 2005 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susanstinsonHere, in response to earlier, beautiful posts by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pitbull_poet, is a piece I wrote more than twenty years ago, after I spent a little time at a women's peace camp in Seneca Falls, New York. There are some graphic descriptions of pictures from the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing in the piece. It was first published in Sinister Wisdom.
Ariel's Song
(published in Sinister Wisdom # 25, Winter 1984)
I saw a photograph of skulls piled up in a schoolyard, a couple of charts, and some blind eyes blown-up larger than life (cataracts caused by the flash). One image I didn't recognize until I read the caption. It looked like a piece of plywood someone had been hacking at with the wrong end of a hammer, but turned out to be a boy's back, standing up in tufts, and cracked.
The pictures were black and white.
I never could have looked so long if I had noticed right away that it was a picture of a human. It was late morning, hot. Women were wrapping themselves in black and picking out pictures to wear to the Seneca Army Depot, where we believe nuclear weapons are stored. I had just eaten an orange and a slice of sourdough bread. E was sick. She had the shakes all night, her night in jail. B was the phone with her mom, trying to explain the point of civil disobedience. I was quiet.
The photographs had been taken soon after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Photographers choose subjects and angles, but I don't believe that these pictures could have been taken dishonestly. The lie here was that I could look away, could reach out and touch E, although I didn't, could reach out and touch the dirt and listen to the soft talk of the women planning their vigil at the gate. I could turn the pictures on their backs and see only cardboard, or rip them up and see trash. Some people from the town did that. They hated to see things litter "their" fence, the depot fence.
A guy in a pick-up truck full of kids pulled over at the main gate of the depot as a group of women kept vigil there. He demanded "a spokesman" (emphasis his). A woman responded, listening to him for about twenty minutes. Every now and then one of the kids in the back yelled, "Go home!" He objected to the presence of lesbians at the camp, but his main complaint was against all of the messy banners flying near the road. He didn't like the origami peace cranes hanging on the fence, either. He said, "You don't need that stuff any more. People driving by know who you are and what you want. The whole country knows. Clean up the yard and take that stuff down."
The women at the Seneca Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice face the fence that surrounds the depot, noted its powers of concealment of division, and then tried to transform it. They climbed over the fence, slid under it, sang through it, talked through it, and made it into a backdrop for yarn webs and photographs of suffering. The army responded with a symbol of its own: a yellow line was painted in front of the gate, and women were told that they must not cross it. Women danced across it, or crawled, and reenacted deaths on the other side. They were detained, or arrested, or simply watched. The process scared me, because the army symbolized its intentions with uniforms, clubs, and razor wire, against the scarves and face paints of the women.
Walking back to camp from the gate one day, I waved to two people sitting on lawn chairs in the garage. Their grass was lined with American flags. Joe waved back, and offered me some iced tea. Stasia brought me a sandwich with thick slices of tomato from her garden, and told me about being a welder during World War II. We didn't know each other, but Joe had noticed me walking to and from the gate before. He said I always looked tired. He offered to let me take a shower. I did. Stasia played "Winchester Cathedral" on the organ for me. Joe said he didn't care to discuss Cruise and Pershing II missiles, but added, "Two weeks ago, they had a regular marching band, those girls, and some were dressed up , up on stilts. Now, that was something different. Those girls were clever. But when you mess with the federal government, you're messing with a delicate thing."
Americans bombed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945: three days later they bombed Nagasaki. Now, in August 1983, a woman commemorated those three days by sitting at the main gate, fasting and keeping silent. I sat with her alone for a while. The beat of her drum, the heat and quiet of the day, and the seriousness of what we were marking made me want some poetry. All I had in my mind right then was Shakespeare, the enslaved spirit Ariel's song from The Tempest.
I said it aloud, but I don't know if the silent woman or the silent MP could hear in my voice what I heard in those lines: the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the tortured and murdered of El Salvador and South Africa, the Native Americans dying near uranium mines, the workers dying at Rocky Flats, the battered women, the raped women, and all of the leeched poor honored and mourned. I repeated the poem, saying "thy mother," and "her eyes." The skulls in the schoolyard were not coral, blinded eyes are not pearls, but a sea change, as wide and deep as the see, that will take the results of our own brutality and force into new ways "rich and strange" is the only way to honor those dead, the only way to do justice to those living.
pitbull_poet, is a piece I wrote more than twenty years ago, after I spent a little time at a women's peace camp in Seneca Falls, New York. There are some graphic descriptions of pictures from the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing in the piece. It was first published in Sinister Wisdom. Ariel's Song
(published in Sinister Wisdom # 25, Winter 1984)
I saw a photograph of skulls piled up in a schoolyard, a couple of charts, and some blind eyes blown-up larger than life (cataracts caused by the flash). One image I didn't recognize until I read the caption. It looked like a piece of plywood someone had been hacking at with the wrong end of a hammer, but turned out to be a boy's back, standing up in tufts, and cracked.
The pictures were black and white.
I never could have looked so long if I had noticed right away that it was a picture of a human. It was late morning, hot. Women were wrapping themselves in black and picking out pictures to wear to the Seneca Army Depot, where we believe nuclear weapons are stored. I had just eaten an orange and a slice of sourdough bread. E was sick. She had the shakes all night, her night in jail. B was the phone with her mom, trying to explain the point of civil disobedience. I was quiet.
The photographs had been taken soon after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Photographers choose subjects and angles, but I don't believe that these pictures could have been taken dishonestly. The lie here was that I could look away, could reach out and touch E, although I didn't, could reach out and touch the dirt and listen to the soft talk of the women planning their vigil at the gate. I could turn the pictures on their backs and see only cardboard, or rip them up and see trash. Some people from the town did that. They hated to see things litter "their" fence, the depot fence.
A guy in a pick-up truck full of kids pulled over at the main gate of the depot as a group of women kept vigil there. He demanded "a spokesman" (emphasis his). A woman responded, listening to him for about twenty minutes. Every now and then one of the kids in the back yelled, "Go home!" He objected to the presence of lesbians at the camp, but his main complaint was against all of the messy banners flying near the road. He didn't like the origami peace cranes hanging on the fence, either. He said, "You don't need that stuff any more. People driving by know who you are and what you want. The whole country knows. Clean up the yard and take that stuff down."
The women at the Seneca Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice face the fence that surrounds the depot, noted its powers of concealment of division, and then tried to transform it. They climbed over the fence, slid under it, sang through it, talked through it, and made it into a backdrop for yarn webs and photographs of suffering. The army responded with a symbol of its own: a yellow line was painted in front of the gate, and women were told that they must not cross it. Women danced across it, or crawled, and reenacted deaths on the other side. They were detained, or arrested, or simply watched. The process scared me, because the army symbolized its intentions with uniforms, clubs, and razor wire, against the scarves and face paints of the women.
Walking back to camp from the gate one day, I waved to two people sitting on lawn chairs in the garage. Their grass was lined with American flags. Joe waved back, and offered me some iced tea. Stasia brought me a sandwich with thick slices of tomato from her garden, and told me about being a welder during World War II. We didn't know each other, but Joe had noticed me walking to and from the gate before. He said I always looked tired. He offered to let me take a shower. I did. Stasia played "Winchester Cathedral" on the organ for me. Joe said he didn't care to discuss Cruise and Pershing II missiles, but added, "Two weeks ago, they had a regular marching band, those girls, and some were dressed up , up on stilts. Now, that was something different. Those girls were clever. But when you mess with the federal government, you're messing with a delicate thing."
Americans bombed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945: three days later they bombed Nagasaki. Now, in August 1983, a woman commemorated those three days by sitting at the main gate, fasting and keeping silent. I sat with her alone for a while. The beat of her drum, the heat and quiet of the day, and the seriousness of what we were marking made me want some poetry. All I had in my mind right then was Shakespeare, the enslaved spirit Ariel's song from The Tempest.
Full fathoms five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Hark now I hear them – ding-dong bell.
I said it aloud, but I don't know if the silent woman or the silent MP could hear in my voice what I heard in those lines: the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the tortured and murdered of El Salvador and South Africa, the Native Americans dying near uranium mines, the workers dying at Rocky Flats, the battered women, the raped women, and all of the leeched poor honored and mourned. I repeated the poem, saying "thy mother," and "her eyes." The skulls in the schoolyard were not coral, blinded eyes are not pearls, but a sea change, as wide and deep as the see, that will take the results of our own brutality and force into new ways "rich and strange" is the only way to honor those dead, the only way to do justice to those living.