I
haven’t kept up with writing a piece a week about one of the photos our youth
photography program produced. I’ve been
busy, I’ve been down, I’ve been sick.
Ok, got that out of the way.
I
picked this photo because it troubles me the most. The only color is the two notices on the
door, both of which are pulling away. As
if the framers of these theses didn’t really care if they stood the test of
time. The tape is pulling away; the
staple was not driven in all the way. Their message is clear: time to get
out. You don’t belong here anymore.
And
yet, artistically, the photograph is beautiful: the lines, the angle of the
shot, the sense that maybe a little breeze is trying to lift the papers away. The young photographer had an eye for shape
and framing. Also a lot of courage to
take a photo of a heartbreak rendered in legalese.
I
don’t know who lived here, and what ghosts might inhabit a building found to be
condemned. When children at church ask
me if I believe in ghosts, I tell them no. When writing poetry, that’s another
question. I do think that when we
inhabit spaces fully, the space begins to inhabit us. That’s why in the best stories, the place
itself becomes a character. And the
characters leave a trace of their spirit in whatever place they pass through.
I
imagine there is some heartache behind these notices on the door, heartaches
that may be hard to notice because they are hidden from us. Perhaps a family of immigrants—documented
children, undocumented adults—who had to flee quickly. Maybe a family that lost a job or had a
health problem and couldn’t afford the rent or mortgage. Maybe an unjust landlord. The meaning is not posted with these
officials signs. Only that the building
has been declared “unfit for human occupation.”
We don’t know why the people who lived here left, or where they have
gone. It makes me cry out for justice,
for renewal, for grace.
I
have been writing a series of linked stories that first started being placed in
my hometown of Austin, Minnesota. But as
the stories grew, it began to be more about a small city’s relationship with
what became a ghost town. In “real life”
there was a ghost town named Two Rivers, just south of Austin. In the stories I’m writing, Two Rivers has
become the settlement that the townspeople blame for their misfortune, a place
that houses the “other” in a way that makes the respectable citizens uneasy. Eventually
they burn the people of Two Rivers out, blaming them for the Spanish Flu
epidemic. But the woundedness and the
beauty of Two Rivers does not disappear, but rather becomes part of the
landscape.
I
wrote this poem as a companion piece to those stories. It was originally
published in the Austin Daily Herald
around Halloween last year:
WHAT IF A GHOST
TOWN HAS NO GHOSTS?
What
if its river carries no cries down its long
and
twisted fingers? What if the cemetery
has
no
hinges between heaven and hell? What if
the
stories you were told were told to the first hearers
not
to lift their wings or give them hope,
but to
shut
them up for every hour? What if the
shovels
and
the pitchforks and the lanterns and the shouts
all
marshaled to bring the old town down, still hover
in
the copse of pin oak and maple that looks
over
the long, slow bend in the river? What
if
the
houses, built log by log, peg by peg,
first
the frame, than the roof, then the longing
in
the roof, the longing for sky and protection
from
storms, the child’s dreams wafted into prayer,
the
moon beheld and the sun obeyed; what if
the
chair set by the sick bed and the stool pulled
next
to the stove in deep winter were the first
to
go up in flames; and what if those bodies,
the
dammed and the saved, did not weep as they
were
driven from their homes, but held their hands
as
wings in front of their bodies,
two
to cover the face, two to cover the flesh,
two
to hover and to rise as if all sacrifice
were
but the backlash of praise, and what if
those
angels, those devoured by our fear,
hold
not to hatred, nor sorrow, nor the lust
to
kill, but incense, candlelight, the taste
of
warm bread and sweet wine, and what if
as
you and I walk through fields of poppies and oxeyes,
our
eyes brightened by the late summer sun,
we
discover that what we thought was curse
was
blessing, and that these enemies
driven
from among us, have returned
in
our children, in our song, and will stand
for
us in the last night, in the last breath,
in
the sound of the trumpet?
What
will we say then?
* * *
What
are the ghosts in our communities, our houses, our nation that cry out to be
noticed? What do you say?
Be
justice. Be beauty. Take Notice
Patrick
