About Crows

When I Opened the Anthology of Poets Oppressed

14 W h en I O p en ed t h e A n t h o lo gy o f P o e ts O p p r e s sed When I read the narratives and lyrics—the odes, meditations, epistolaries, postcards, prayers, pastorals, elegies, testimonios, ballads, and fragments, when I considered sound, form, rhythm, syntax, symbolism, structure, metaphor, diction, tone, style, image, and line, how soon I grew underwhelmed by the poems themselves and found myself turning to the perfect silence of the biographies about poets forced to suffer in distant prisons, to take foreign names, to translate agony into alien tongues, about poets with parentheses beside their names: (1912–?), about poets who didn’t die but disappeared into the North, whose last words were found stitched into the lining of a coat three months after falling from a death march, whose last words were recovered from mass graves and dried in the sun, whose last words were pressed with fingernails into a bar of soap, how soon I found myself replacing their words, so that “Golden tones of sunset” became “kidnapped and presumed dead,” so that “Raindrops on a mulberry leaf” became “solitary confinement for three years,” so that “The time for you to come is the time when I am waiting” became “possible victim of medical experimentation,” O chiming city! O atrocity! O gulag moon glow waterboarding winter orchid O harbor boat torturer O O secret police! how soon I wanted to close the book and wander off alone—without wallet, pen, paper, keys, or cellphone—into the dark swamps around my house, until I was knee-deep in the rushes and lost completely, until I could only think of myself desperate for safety, until I could look up and see: no stars. ...