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Faceless
By
Caroline Maun You speak of not being able to see
your face.
I’m trying to understand.
I raise my eyes to look at you
To see you
In you
And to hope you look back and see
I am raw ends and tethered means
The target user of an end product
That took decades to degrade
The history of my oppression is
ongoing
And quite mundane
I am my own enforcer
Strict father, receding mother,
abandonment, anger,
poverty, absence, death, anger,
deprecation, rape.
I don’t know what it would be
like to be you
And I can barely say what it is to
be me.
A photograph conveying the bald
truth of photographs.
The depths of Mississippi.
The late twenties?
There is a ring of white faces.
Perhaps the clergyman is there.
The shopkeeper, the shoemaker, the
farmers, the smith.
An exhilarated housewife in a
cloche hat.
At the edges of the picture,
others crowd in
Wanting to remember, commemorate,
and be a part of this.
One man draws his son close to be
included.
Another holds up a four by four
for extra fuel.
No one shields their eyes from the
flash
No one tries to hide
There are amiable smiles and the
excitement from an event
This was, one gathers, a job well
done.
In
the center is the silhouette,
In classic and universal attitude
of unbearable suffering,
Of a burning black man
On his knees
The smell of his fleshsmoke
Filled their nostrils, and they
had twisted so far
As to love it
The rim of the spectacle
White scum of hate
Flash
* * *
* *
Caroline
Maun, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary
Studies at Wayne State University posted 12 November 2005 |
