Mule
- Mule
I sat in the high-back chair facing your bed, silence and the long day between us. I listened for a sound of need from you, grown smaller, almost lost to the shadows enclosing the room. I was nine and brave, they said, to do this.
The cancer had attacked your throat and stomach. I didn’t know the pain you felt, just that you were weak, could eat only liquids drawn through a tube. How it reduced you from the tough, angry grandfather who frightened us, who shouted and cursed his wife, gold-grey eyes glinting like a blade.
Before illness whittled you all the way down to pride, you worked full days with a mule hard-driven through the boss’ land. You warned us never to stand behind it, so I took its twitching, pointed ears, unblinking eyes and rooted stance for stubbornness, disregard, connected this to you.
Only the whistle and tick of your lungs answered that you were still there, not yet become spirit under my patient gaze. You never betrayed what surely was brokenness, the suffering that consumed you even before it ruined your body. For months you held on, until school ended my vigil and I woke one morning to hear you’d gone.
Selected works by Sharan Strange:
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• First Sight
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• Hunger
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• Natural Occurrences
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• Froggy’s Class: South Carolina, 1969
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• Dorothy
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• Mule
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• February 19,1994
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• Ash
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• The Unintended Life
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• The Factory
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• The Stranger
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• The Body
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• An Interview with Sharan Strange
Sharan Strange, a member of the Dark Room Collective, teaches literature and social studies at Parkmont School, an independent non-traditional middle and high school in Washington, D.C. In 1995, she received the M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Gell Writers’ Center, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Agni, Black Bread, Best American Poetry, 1994 (A. R. Ammons, ed.), The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry (Clarence Major, ed.), and Callaloo. Her poems have also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston). She is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina.
