Spathes
I gather now dry-leaf spathes
that boys spear-wave
and sword-cross, float
into flooded gutters
like dugout canoes.
I arrange them on the wall
in peacock array. Hollowed
scoops that were sheathes,
wombs for palm tree florescence,
cast-off husks, now you
are canoes that we women
paddle on the brown-green river
of consciousness. I layer
spathes into a ladder
that holds my spirit weight.
One green spade I take from
my deck of playing cards. I place
it in the centre of this altar.
A shield. A crude halo
for the goddess who granted me
time on Earth and a daughter.
The father told me when I was pregnant
that the child was all that mattered.
The baby was the corn-ear;
I was the husk that he would
chuck away. I gave birth, Saraswati.
I believed that I was not a husk.
Green seed, green heart.
Let my daughter receive your gifts
of music, poetry and a strong mind,
so that she, too, knows that no woman
is a husk to be tossed away,
a sword to be crossed,
a canoe to drift and drown
in any swollen gutter.
****
This week’s poem is from Loretta Collins Klobah’s collection Ricantations. What I first admired about the poems, simply by looking at them, was their claim to physical space, their amplitude. Spathes is one of the shorter poems in the collection – Collins Klobah typically writes a two- or three-page narrative poem, sometimes more. Whatever the length, the concept is of a small voyage rather than a bordered space of lyric stillness. They’re not prose-poems, either, and it’s a pleasure to feel the rhythmic energy of the line and be propelled by that as well as the vividness of her scenes and the vernacular force of her diction. These “Ricantations” are indeed rich – capacious arias of Puerto Rico, the “rich port”, and elsewhere, performed as public as well as private stories.
The botanical term spathe refers to the sheath around the flowers of some plants. The word comes from the Latin for broadsword, “spatha”, and this is picked up in the tough-textured compound verbs of the poem’s opening lines, “spear-wave” and “sword-cross”. But these sharp edges are presented as part of a female experience, surrounded by gentler, simpler verbs: “gather”, “arrange”. The spathes take on other shapes: they are also empty wombs, the “husks” which will become significant later in the poem. As “canoes”, they give access to “the brown green river of consciousness”; as “ladders”, they are able to bear the speaker’s “spirit weight”. Etymology invites the imagination to a new place, the “green spade” yielded by the deck of playing cards and turned into a humble but potent votive offering, a “shield” and “crude halo” to “the goddess who granted me / time on Earth and a daughter”.
In her note to the poem, the writer explains that it “responds to an art installation project by Trinidadian artist Wendy Nanan that made use of papier-mache, shells and palm tree pods, a poetic sequence and photos by Andre Bagoo, and a curatorial project by Marsha Pearce”. The poem was then part of a sequence, exhibited with Nanan’s art in the spring of 2016, at Medulla Art Gallery in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Speaking for the artist as well as the artwork, Spathes seems to bind together the various aspects of women’s creativity – sexuality, motherhood and artistic production – alongside the symbolism of political regeneration (“Green seed, green heart”).
There’s a powerful negative charge in the poem: the attitude of the baby’s father towards the mother and her body. It’s summoned in a direct, colloquial voice, all the more powerful for its simplicity: “The father told me when I was pregnant / that the child was all that mattered. / The baby was the corn-ear; / I was the husk that he would / chuck away.” The woman’s implied response is dignified and without self-pity. At this point, performative utterance becomes remembrance and remembrance becomes prayer: “I gave birth, Saraswati. / I believed that I was not a husk.” There may only be one woman speaking, but the collective has already been summoned (“we women”) and here the poem reaches a powerful moment of compassion. Offering her small gifts to the Hindu goddess of learning and the arts, she invokes Saraswati’s generosity towards all unvalued mothers and daughters. The poem returns to images from the beginning – danger has not been swept away but coexists with the redemptive making of art and voicing of prayers.
- Versions of some other poems from Rincantations are published online in the Ekphrastic Review