"On Contemplating the Breasts of Pauline Lumumba" by Brenda Marie Osbey

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 9, 2018   On Contemplating the Breasts of Pauline Lumumba   Brenda Marie Osbey

Pauline Opango Onosamba Lumumba 1937–2014   When it is finally ours...this beautiful and terrible thing.... —"Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden   1. we like to imagine that liberation comes in the natural order of things carried on such fabled winds of change that even in the heat of assassination slaughter and awesome dying for right of millions, or else some solitary beautifully ordinary brother cannot be missed or misconstrued but there are so many added costs and taxes as to trip us up quite easily in all the clamor and bravura of this liberation business. and then, of course, the grief-stricken bared breasts of pauline lumumba— no half-century long enough to bury the blank and heavy forward-propelled pace widow flanked on two sides by men daring aching to protect her and she already worlds beyond— who among us looks on those breasts and is not bowed?   2. beloved companion the letter begins beloved companion we are not alone and history will one day have its say how does one look into the frank, unstoried eyes of one's child and say we are not alone? how does one address the letter that reads whether i am free or in prison alive or already in death's maw? to what khakied and accursed postal worker falls the task of bearing so hard and heavy final and unbearably dear a letter? in what corner of one's dank and filthy cell is it written? where do the flower petals of one's springtime dress fall away to on      receiving it? and what is the weight of those hands, slim-fingered and otherwise      empty full now of driest air coming slowly slowly from neighboring forest and savanna? when does the gnawing of marrow begin to tell the ages-old story of the death even of hope when after everything after all we are not alone? 3. month of the wolf month of solemnities and annunciations as good a beginning as any january then surely was seasonable enough for death by torture by      beating by shooting by three adept and clearly necessary firing squads for      three men already half-dead fully bloodied from head to heels orifices swollen to proud flesh ripe-red for the plucking one at a time in a row from that tree buried unburied dismembered doused with acid how how many ways to kill men whose ideals clearly were that much more costly than uranium? uranium. yes.   january seasonable for mourning-time— assassinating martyr-making widowmaking time of year 4. they liked in those brief months they liked to report on your loveliness, didn't they? european press couldn't get enough of you— your slight waist and native grace the pretty way you held the pretty child how you held to the arm of the young hero-husband so clearly perfectly patently marked both for victory and for early death eyes wide with all the world could then imagine of vicious and reverberating grief pretty young wife and mother become symbol become widow to generation and to continents history and biographers— nothing said of the shambled life from center to border flight into egypt beyond and back again death-startled children in tow.   what will they write in a single decade's time of how you yourself chose the warm tenth-month of sacrifices and of minor feasts, lesser saints fewer and requisite number of martyred virgins told no one of your journey— december and death in your own bed— asleep asleep alone as ever you were leaving now fully alone continents grieving worlds humbled contemplating now and forever, again bared grief-flattened breasts as earth as at the inevitable and deliberate coming of end times of hope.                Copyright © 2018 Brenda Marie Osbey. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I wrote this poem in response to the famous photo of Pauline Lumumba walking through the streets of Leopoldville following the January 1961 assassination of her husband. Patrice Lumumba had been the first prime minister of the newly independent Republic of Congo. This work interrogates the early euphoria of African nations achieving independence from colonial rule after decades of resistance, balanced against the personal costs of such activism. Situated at the juncture of public mourning and private grief, the poem examines Pauline Lumumba's most powerful statement: her bare-breasted walk through the streets in mourning for and in protest against the murder of her husband. Juxtaposed alongside her refusal to be made invisible in the face of rank injustice is the image of her own quiet death." —Brenda Marie Osbey   Brenda Marie Osbey is the author of six books, including All Souls: Essential Poems (Lousiana State University Press, 2015) and History and Other Poems (Time Being Books, 2013). She is a 2018 Virginia Foundation for the Humanities fellow and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. A former Louisiana state poet laureate, Osbey is a native of New Orleans.   Photo credit: H. Baquet Poetry by Osbey   All Souls (Louisiana State University Press, 2015) "Ota Benga at Edenkraal" by Yusef Komunyakaa "Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott's 'George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware'" by Anaïs Duplan "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden August Guest Editor: Evie Shockley   Thanks to Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shockley and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. 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