TAKE NOTICE

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