Know Thyself
By Hannah Scofield
Inside my soul are a thousand others; a galaxy rotating around.
Echoing voices without bodies; I wonder who they are.
These words need shapes--I swirl the black ink to form houses to hold their longing cries--
the voices of the spheres now have a shape: maybe an "a," a "u," an "o."
Form for the formless.
The whispers now have names; they have their own thoughts; their own personalities;
all shaped by the letters of the alphabet that give tangibility to the untouchables.
A universe on a paper page.
And so, it has always been that I have two callings:
The first, to give a voice to the voiceless; and then, the second: with that voice, to give it form.
To pull from a screaming void and create a body for words hidden in space;
this is why I write.
Winter’s Cradles
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
{Written when someone dear left}
In the bleakness of the winter
there is numbness in the air,
and empty pine trees are
pining, pining away, reminding me of you.
Maybe that’s why we weep in January, for
THERE IS NO FOLIAGE
around us to smother sunlight oozing through trees,
duplicating the chilly warmth of your last touch.
The loss of songbirds—now that is a funeral of its own—
a silent orchestra in my head reminding me
how light the fouls’ chirps and whistles used to be!
And now, in the frost, birds no longer trill songs to distract me
from the tenor of your voice—of how it drifted, delicate and timid,
all the way up to the shy rain in summer clouds.
When our souls were knit as one, I could hear your timbre,
up in the wet blue sky, drifting above me.
A breeze would come softly, and I would think,
he is breathing amongst the rain clouds!
Rain is different in winter.
The cloudless sky, the naked tree-lines and pastures,
listlessly drone of your absence.
Life is in hiding.
We stroll, the world and I:
Thinking. Wishing. Longing.
Thumping our soft soles on our driveways, our sidewalks,
searching for lives lost—for the hands that once tickled us, for the
lips that whispered sweet honey in our ears.
We wonder where the euphoria of it all went.
Perhaps in spring’s blossoms, we will find vitality again.
Yet every new year brings a new face to miss.
Where did you go?
It is no comfort to me that across shriveled grass beneath a sunken sun,
through miles of brumal emptiness in
crunchy yellow meadows where nothing can hide,
I still cannot find you.
Nothing grows; the land is barren; the world is a
frigid skeleton, its deadness reminding me that:
You were once flesh and blood.
And now you are gone.
My Mother Is A Church
Hannah Scofield
My mother is a church.
But I don’t know why.
Why is it that when I drive down Highway 49 and see the little church house,
I think of her?
It’s my favorite church, though I have never entered.
The one-room sanctuary is near my house, and it has white boards that
gleam in Alabama’s humid sun.
It always looks clean and ethereal, sitting there in the grass, but only until,
God forbid, you stare at it a little longer and see its white paint chipping
open unto the black, rotting wood beneath.
The yard’s kept, but no one’s there on Sunday.
I sometimes wonder if it’s an accident that we can see the church at all.
Maybe the road going past is just a tear in a visual timeline,
a drive-by memory spilling open on the edge of a desaturated concrete highway, reminding us that holiness exists--
angels are singing somewhere in that smooth, gold-fogged heaven,
beside fire-ant beds and crumpled Pepsi.
The speed limit is 45, slow enough to notice the church house
on the edge, but fast enough to make sure you you don’t stare too long to see something beyond the glory that was, and not:
A portrait of Elegance dilapidating.
A stoically situated sentiment, openly hidden between oaks and pines, just 100 yards away from that chicken farm with all the roosters. “Yeah, you know, you’ll see it, just go left. That place with all the triangle chicken coops, on your way to Piggly Wiggly. Yes, that one.”
The power-blue sign creaking outside says, "Florence.”
It sways silently in the air like it's new.
It’s pretty. In a field of green leaves.
Why, when I think of the wooden church; pale and sharp,
black and white, do I think of my mother's wedding day, captured
forever on the left side of the frame in my father's garage?
Spiderwebs on it, the photo itself faded, the glass cracked.
When I see the church, I see my mother’s blushed cheeks against her
most striking feature--her pale skin, so pale because she
bathed in sunscreen after her mother died of melanoma when my mom was eighteen;
my mother’s icy white dress, white as the paint;
her black, coily hair, streaming down, like the rotting wood beneath it;
her divine body washed out by the Polaroid flash.
My father is almost lost in the shadows.
The white September sunlight, the building's wedding veil, shimmering down the steeple; the black wood, my mother’s gentle crown, ready for the paradisiacal bridegroom to come and enter in.
Maybe it’s her presence that I sense at the church.
See, I know why it's abandoned.
The church says: "Watch me, don't enter. Would you dare walk
into what is picturesque, and ruin it? You would only damage it."
Would you fuck an angel?
It almost seems sacrilegious to ask.
But sometimes, like an angel, and sometimes like God,
my mother, too, has a sharpness.
I don't know how to explain it; it's like the wooden boards of the church--a hundred splintering, 180-degree edges, demanding respect.
Demanding reverence.
My mother has what she calls a “Roman nose,”
pointing out straight and sharp, emphasized by her thick,
blunt bangs and dark eyeliner; her tingling, glass eyes, open wide as the bottom of a glass, peer out so soft that it only makes her nose point more.
Her hair’s now white and gray and black.
I smell her plastic lipstick (why does all lipstick smell like play dough and strawberries?), the Earthy paint of the church building, the sweet moldy odor of rotting boards. I smell her summer sweat, masked in Vanilla, remembering how she sprayed that musty yellow liquid all over her white linen blouse
on our way to a family funeral when I was little.
A ride in which she wept like the church gutters, and told me with her eyes that the funeral home was the last home she and her mother ever shared.
Poetry is not catharsis, I remind myself.
No matter how I tell a truth, it may never heal.
And these words will never heal her, or the church,
or the way the world and I stand watching, broken as the outside of it,
staring, not entering; thinking of God and His angels.
Speaking to them, but never walking inside.
Why is it, that though I have never parked my car in the church’s parking lot,
never slid my boots outside the car door, that
I feel pollen sticking to my legs as I stand outside the church?
I cannot let my mother know she reminds me of this place;
I will not tell her that one day, after twenty years,
I slowed my car down to a shameful “10 mph” in the middle of the highway
and pulled out my Polaroid on my way home.
"My mother is beautiful," says my brother.
"My mother is kind," says another.
"My mother had me young," says one.
"My mother had me old," says the other.
"My mother had me as a passion baby.”
“My mother had me unexpected.”
“My mama cooks so well that everyone wants to eat her food."
Everyone has a mother.
My mother is a church.
Alone and quiet on a country road in Chelsea, Alabama.
A white box in a green wisteria sea. Breathing in the air, I taste
honeysuckle and lemonade on my lips. Boards that feel rough at first, and then not so strong, the edge of them breaking off. I smell the moist Earth,
the moldy paint almost melted by the rain like ice cream.
I smell that playdough lipstick, and dirt and pink sugar and tomatoes.
I hear the swaying swish of the wind and truck driving by, passing her, the metally, groaning engine.
And I don’t know why.
[There is a fox in my brain]
by Hannah Scofield.
Thursday, September 1.
There is a fox in my brain
that gnaws on my dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
As a result, I cannot trust.
“I will always be your friend,” you assure me.
Your promises of eternal kinship pierce me, but they are not as sharp as the fox’s s teeth.
The outer layer of my brain I call “the promise that you will love me tomorrow,” is the fox’s favorite snack.
The beast loves it the same way my younger sibling’s mouth waters over brisket fat— surely trust is the outer slime on a meaty brain that is devoured first.
Because I cannot fight the fox, I tell myself that trust, like excess fat, slows me down.
It insulates me and makes me feel safe.
Feelings are dangerous.
Leanness makes it easier to run free.
The fox eats away the flesh of comfort so that I may always be on alert, you see.
I must be thankful for its orange body up behind my eyes.
And then I wonder:
Does everyone have a fox in their head?
There must be other animals in this world that don’t eat away the luxurious excess, malnourishing a brain that wants so hard to be thick with love.
I’ve heard some people’s brains are filled with bees, that suck on the flowers around them.
The flowers are made of any moment of kindness caught between dusk and dawn.
The bees regurgitate the flowers, coating the brain with golden honey.
I wish there were bees in my brain;
but the fox would eat their syrup.
I feel like the Spartan boy who let a fox his stomach away, rather than suffer more.
But would anyone like to adopt a fox?
Whose World Was Here First?
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
“What planet are you daydreaming in?” they ask me.
“You don’t fit into this world.”
Whose world?
My world. You’re taking it over.
You put toilet paper on my oaks after a football game;
you slap down stores that whitewash my stars.
Why do you laugh when I touch every branch that hangs above me,
or roll your eyes when I cry about the raccoon you shot when he ate our
blueberries, the bush where I sit to pray?
“Why are you too sensitive? Accept reality.”
Which of us is ungrounded when you detached from the beauty in my world,
our world,
God’s world?
Engulfed in the Folds
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
{Written when the realization came that the one I cared for would never know}
In a world you'll never see, I held you gently against my knee.
You’ll be interested to know your head was soft and warm.
Silky knaps streamed down my lap as they bounced down your back—
so soft, dear child, so pure.
I wrapped my fingers within your curls as you dreamed,
placed a hand-sewn quilt down your neck to your feet.
And as your unconscious shoulders dropped, I murmured:
"Blessed are you, Creator, for bestowing creative imagination.
For through it, I feel a human being whom I will never touch."
I want to tell you this even though you won’t hear me
(not only because of the rapidly growing chasm between us,
but also because my lips will never speak love to your face).
You will never know that half of the blood
in my heart runs from the scars of your absence.
But when your shoulders ache from the weight of your head,
and your feet are weary,
your mind longing for the darkness of bed,
rest assured
that for a moment, in another space and time,
in the golden warmth of my mind,
you were swaddled in a warm embrace—
sleep smoothed the anguish etched in your face—
and you looked like a child again.
[Empty, Empty]
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
{Written when my sins estranged me}
Empty, empty.
Lord, without you, I am a person pulled here and there,
limbs stretched like spaghetti, floating in a void.
Muscles flaming from the race.
But who have I been running from?
From the Man Who loves me. From the God who wants me, accepts me.
And to whom do I run?
To people who don't love me. To people who hate my flesh except when they want to take it.
I'm hurt… saddened by every pulse, every breath.
But if I die, would I enter Your arms?
What is paradise like?
I cannot imagine, for all the other worlds, Your perfect world.
I love you, Jesus. But do I?
I have betrayed You worse than those who use me, but
who am I to hold a grudge? To feel poison inside of me against another?
Those who have hurt me have only betrayed the woman who betrayed the Son of God.
Why am I hurt?
I do not know what it is like to feel Your love anymore.
Wrap Your arms around me, Lord Jesus, and rock me to sleep.
[Who Would Want to Be a Chef?]
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
Who would want to be a chef,
with all those people in the kitchen?
I’d rather burn a single serving of ramen each night
than brew a feast with a staff of humans
breathing down my neck!
Notes on the Sky, April 8, 2021
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
[Written when I wanted to be grateful as opposed to overly sentimental]
The sunset is creamy orange.
drowning emblems of tomorrow's yesterday.
In each colorful streak in its horizon, we see the day's tears we shed dripping as the evening dew.
The rising and the setting, mundane and monotonous at times, looks different because of the memories we form:
the eyes of the animal who nuzzled us,
the sandwich we ate for breakfast…
those are the events that make up the sunset,
informing its palette.
Each new artifact of memories we made the day before
implanted in the slipping sunshine with its polluted smorgasbord of lights.
When we look at the horizon, we see each other.
This reminds us that:
every day is a gift, and sufficient is the day for its own trouble.
Jan 9, 2022. Schulenberg.
Triangles on the lake.
All pointing left.
The whitish-blue hue of the clouds painting hurried ripples.
I wonder what the triangles are pointing toward;
at first, I imagined, as they imitate the color of the sky, they also reflect the secret road signs of heaven,
etched in the clouds, known only by the precocious blackbirds who float leftward above the textured pool.
Where are you going, blackbirds?
Are they searching for their Creator who fashioned their wings after His own pleasure;
searching for the Holy Spirit Who floated above water before Earth orbited the heavens?
Of course, the water points leftward because of the wind.
The Earth's breath is also what the birds ride upon, floating like the triangles on the lake,
or like an opera singer's notes that ornament her breath.
And the pool doesn't only float leftward, my reason confronts my imagination;
if you look, the triangles going left loop all around the tiny lake so that they loop in a circle like a recycling symbol.
If I sat on the other side of the lake, they're all going right. It's all about perspective.
Everything, if you think about it, makes sense logically.
No feelings. No spirits needed.
Ignore the way the wet grass soaks through my shoes,
making me wonder if Christ's feet were wet when He walked toward the cross.
Don't pay attention to your musings about whether or not the giant cold rock beneath you is real,
waiting until the final day to become flesh. Everything makes sense if you think it and don't feel it.
Everything except…
That one blackbird that keeps riding opposite the other ones in the wind.
Its own person, continually floating above the lake, then floating away from it.
Going right. The only bird going right.
Do the triangles on the lake point to God or the lonely blackbird?
Or is everything left and right because You, Holy Spirit, are everywhere?
What if the pulsing breathes of Earth are the varied breaths,
gentle and clean, that we feel against on our backs as
You look over us like a mother hen, finding children around which to wrap your own wings.
You Holy bird.
Sparrow.
Dove.
God.
Today, Lord, I love being a woman.
I love flirting. I love men, and also grinning at the stars above me and talking for hours about dreams.
I love knowing a spirit is inside me. It burns alive inside a body—my body.
I love my body—short, fair, curvy, and a little, funny—almost ironic, the combination of
yin and yang, reflected in my fleshy and pale, yet dark and angular {asymmetrical} face…
topped off with dark doe-eyes and a bird’s nest of hair…
awkward jokes, shy lashes, a mischievous smirk—unless I’m deep in thought with that mugshot jaw and harried brow.
“Grace,” an old friend said to me kindly as we spoke on the phone. “You’re full of grace.”
Thank you, Lord, for the grace dancing within me, that same grace smoothing the words and movements of my mother and sister…
ah, their gentle eyes, steps, tones.
Is it the same grace as Yours when you would sit for hours, listening to those whose hearts broke before you mended them—sometimes even
completely?
You are Love. You are grace.
I am thankful for plants—green and lush—basil, rosemary, cacti—and animals—birds, cows, cats, dogs, lizards, etc—that surround me.
The birds that whistle above me; the cats who tilt their fuzzy heads and stare at me—big moons of baby eyes.
You, Lord, are the sun and moon in all of us.
I am thankful for every church I’ve ever attended—in homes; in the back of a phone company building; in the lunch hall
of another church; in an old white and brick building with wooden pews; in a quirky church by the biggest cemetery in L. A.,
and now, in a little cute church on Gray Falls Drive with no center aisle.
Sanctuaries. Every day, a sanctuary.
Thank you for my family, my friends, my students, my housemate—the people who give me reasons to wake up early (whenever I do.)
Thank you for words and worlds that comfort me and help me to escape, or perhaps understand, reality a little better.
Hallelujah for cold Texas days with Alabama memories—for green jobs and wanted words.
There is so much more I could thank you for, God.
And yet, Bible in my lap, cold sun in my eyes, watch ticking on my arm, deadlines approaching, I must stop.
At least in this medium, this written prayer.
Bless my father and my mother…my sister, my brothers. Continue to heal.
Make my work today exceptional—stay alive in my heart so that I might not forget You.
Save the lost.
A-men.
{sadness}
The emptiness that fills the heart (’til it breaks).
Cold desire that poisons a kiss;
An isolating atmosphere, silent as angel’s wings, that separates us from paradise.
Frazzling: my hair.
Enlarging: my stomach.
Scraping: my knees.
Why are you crying when even the sky has sunny days?
Paper Ash
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
[Written after a troubling dream I had before moving to Los Angeles]
We walked through the fields where the hay bales slept,
down past the neighbor's trailers where they hung coyotes up to dry.
Finally, we came to my home where, like Lot’s wife whose, temporal longing
dried her into a pillar of salt, I turned my head to the old southern home I was leaving.
When my eyes pulled back ahead, I saw my beloved cat who’d I’d raised since a baby
look at me with her emerald green eyes as her tail turned into paper, up to her head--her
body a whirl of ashes, drifting away with the tossing of the air.
She meowed for me, a gentle furry coo, but I couldn’t save her.
My brother and father were in the car; our beat-up SUV with a luggage boat on top,
laden down with all the worldly goods we could cram in there with my house; but
I had forgotten my travel pillow, which is why I went inside.
And now! And now!
Smoke danced out from my childhood home, and there were my mother and sister coming out,
hair in their dry and light-colored buns, a faraway look in their eyes, as their bodies
turned golden ash, pieces of burnt paper just like the cat,
and I saw pieces of them go, their bodies being gnawed
away with an invisible fire, pulling upward toward heaven.
I cried for them, but my voice was dry.
My mother reached out her hand for me, but I was too
short and them too far gone to heaven to take it.
My soul hurts;
You know that ache you feel as if your chest is being stripped to the bone with sorrow’s
blunt and rusty knife? It burned within me because in a moment,
I knew my memories were leaving me; everything was disappearing without me,
going somewhere better, leaving me alone.
And everything physical that I’d ever clung to dissipated.
Without having to look, I knew the car would disappear last;
And disappear it did, for when I looked from my mother’s gone hand to tell my father and ask him to fix it,
the car was gone. It is no pleasant thing to lose a world in a moment,
and be left behind as one with no hope.
Everything I had ever clung to melted away.
Talcum Dreams
By Hannah Dominque Scofield
[Fragments of Memories with my Sister]
Memory's gates swing open for me today in two giggling sopranos.
Their hinges glisten with talcum snow.
I remember how we danced, dusting our heads with it,
looking at a mirror, and our two chubby hands sharing a bottle of baby powder.
Our bedroom was White Christmas, with all the musical numbers.
{happiness}
Energy coursing through your limbs like salve;
A straightened back, chin erect.
The gentle forehead kiss of the sun on a spring day.
Sadness’s child, the distant memory.
Eyes: Wide with wonder, wet diamonds of loss.
Spirit: stretching like a cat—new hope awaits.
Shoulders: touched by a Christian, marred by pain, a few steps ahead of you,
praying hands on your shoulder, gentle pleading in her lips.
Sincerity.
The loving words of a stranger.
A field to walk in, alone with the forest animals, the Psalms of God in your ears.
An intense, ineffable emotion, but shown in imperfect, warm smiles and tear-stained eyes.
The warmth best felt upon serving another.
Hope for this moment to last forever.
A momentary, unshaken faith in eternity.
Trust that we are not Fatherless
Awareness a Man in heaven prepares his children’s beds.
Belief that those we’ve lost, we’ll meet again.
Knowledge that a Friend will carry us over the river.
The sugary sweet taste of paradise.
Catherine
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
[Written for three women I love]
A woman ringless, like a virgin, watches,
She has long observed her unsuspecting daughter’s silhouette waiting,
soft and forlorn, against the illumined pane.
Through the twistings of starlight for one score of years, this mother,
a band with a setting the size of Saturn now wrenched from her hand,
has watched Jupiter grow old for her child.
The Twins have danced; Leo has devoured Aries then spit him out again;
rainbows have spilled across the sky, and soulless rocks have catapulted
through the ebony universe, even catching themselves aflame,e
all for Catherine.
Catherine:
What weighs down her angelic heart, squeezing gasps
and stutters from her tender chest into the
pink supple borders resting delicately before her
white teeth grinding below her welling eyes
from which shimmering tears gush down her nose, dropping
with a rhythm that makes treetops dance and her mother’s heart beat,
even beating so hard that it breaks for her lonely Catherine?
What would they say, those witches in white, if they could see Catherine now?
They once told her, holding syringes and looking harsh and pitying,
that those eyes would be dull.
“Down syndrome,” they assured her father, was as depressing as how the
“D”
crashed into the
“O”:
“Unbeautifully,” they said.
How shamed they would be if they could see Catherine’s eyes now,
bluish and cold--graceful as seraphim frozen in stone,
or a seething hurricane hurling down paradise in the form of a mist--
its pupils rolling in chasms, irides swirling like clouds ready
to split apart and saturate Mount Olympus and sleeping gods.
“Don’t cry,” is all Mama can say to her apotheosis dropped
to our earth, now cursed or blessed to feel its wretches’ disdain.
As Mama wipes tears adieu, she longs for a siliquoy…..
“You feel diamonds of salt
on your cheeks. But now feel your skin--it’s softer than rain, and when you
sigh, Catherine, listen. It’s the whisperings of saints.”
Could words ever be an anodyne for a recondite being--a derelict of
Earth, and a denizen of the Milky Way;
who conveys with stars and knows
Venus’ birthday; the favorite of the moon,
and a counselor of Pluto--once a giant,
now mocked as a dwarf, and who, like Catherine,
targeted Earth’s scorn by looking different than she?
Could anything a mother says, or could anything a mother does
comfort an angel only seen as a peccadillo?-
Who sways the entire universe, but only wishes a human friend?
She could ask the stars, the moon, or even the sun to love
her daughter more and they would give freely,
shining brighter until the end of their days.
But no riches, or pleas, nor mercy, nor words could ever make humans love
her Catherine who waits by the window, wondering why no one ever comes.
As Mama’s heavy knees drop on the veneer floor covered with stained carpet,
listen:
Here come the sounds, screaming rockets
through space, piercing the atmosphere, hotter than Beelzebub’s coffin,
swifter than shooting stars.
They slingshot through sadness, clinging to Mama’s teardrops
to spin them round and round into a great scintillating nebula
now settling into a nimbus above the obscene squalor
of bricks and swine; rumbling the glass portal,
spoken in half a decibel, kissing her mother’s ears
with a susurration exploding a star into a supernovae
that rejoices the same scientists who
caused Father to leave and broke Catherine and Mother’s
hearts, and whose utterance metamorphosizes
this jeremiad into a love lullaby, slowing it to an end:
“Mama,
Mama,
Mama,”
Catherine whispers, stroking her mother’s tresses.
“I love you, too, Mama.”
Sugar Tear
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
[A poem about loss]
His face was like a flower:
the roundness of his eyes,
the flush of the petals, his mudlark hair,
my euphoria when he sprouted into my field at night,
only to evaporate before I rose to greet him in the morning dew.
When his face dissolved like the flowers of the spring,
my recollection of his face and conversations became the only evidence
that he had ever existed.
Flashes of fragments of time past tangled like stems on electric fence wire.
I asked the gardeners if they’d seen him go.
They replied:
“You do know, don’t you, that blossoms are the snowflakes of late March?
Their blades rise in the shiver of the dawn, veiny icicles sticking high from the dirt.
They pepper the fields at noon, and there is a gentle charisma about them
that suggests they’ll own our valleys eternally. Instead, they melt in the tepid cool of the dusk.
No flower is alike, not even the honeysuckles that seem so bountiful
when they strangle the horse-drawn meadows of April.
For in each trumpet there is only single sugar tear, and for each
tear plucked, there are two more in your eyes, once you realize the spring has left without you,
only the bloated bees, buzzing the hums of a funeral march remind you the soft blush skins have dried.
All the bulbs and blades that tickled your nose when you sniffed them
decayed in the straw of June. Springs’s compost, enriching summer
gardens--the beans, tomato, okra--is made from the lilies and daffodils.
Detritus to detritus. From dust to dust. No bloom stays for more than a season. Don’t you know?
This is the way of things.”
But in heaven I’ve heard, there are chambers of gardens,
and souls drift through wet peat in which the Lilies of the Valley bloom.
Yes, there is a place where gentle deer lap from water,
beside bruised reeds so strong that they never snap.
The gardener there is a flower Himself...the Rose of Sharon.
My love was like a flower, but perhaps he has disappeared to grow in another garden.
I may yet see him again:
For no flax will snap,
or bud dwindle,
in the glory of eternal harvest.
Dindia
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
[Written while visiting an unknown family grave in Holy Cross Cemetery, Ohio, June 2021]
Dindia.
Grandmother. Mother. Father.
Heads together, lined up like you're in
little canoes about to be shipped off to God.
Leaves cover your names,
drowning you like the foam of eternal waters that leads you
into the abyss, or through mystic light.
I want to know your names and why it is that the
greenery chooses to fall upon your cold, catholic stones—
crisp leaves holding you or strangling you—I can't tell.
You, Mother, were Maria.
Did Grandmother name you, or was it Father?
My companion stands beside your headstone;
he moves his shoe near another pile of leaves
on the stone that crowd you,
revealing your Son.
One year. Only one year chiseled beneath his unnamed name.
Is Son alive, or did he only breathe for but a moment,
his face young and blue, starved for the life you gifted him
with your body, soul, and tears?
Perhaps he lives now, and you bought him the headstone before his time,
being prudent and giving.
Maybe Son comes to wipe the earth off your grave, reminding you that
you're not bound by Earth, but as the detritus is floating off your written names,
so your soul floats to and fro from other worlds.
I do not think he lived longer than you.
Regardless of whether he lives or dies,
the wind now is your most regular visitor.
I know this because it sweeps on my blue shirt,
kicking up the flowers on my top,
whispering to me that soon, I too will be a forgotten
and only a strange stone in the mud.
I soon will be buried and forgotten.
After all, no one deserves to be remembered;
we are less than worms, for we nailed Christ to the cros—
guilty, guilty, yes even the 100th Mother Theresa in the Holy Cross cemetery.
Like Peter, we have each betrayed God,
and like Eden’s Eve, we sucked betrayal’s nectar and longed that our lovers dined.
Still, I respect you because you no doubt were strong and loving
and because you were made in God's image.
I am awed by you, for you faced the last trial, the one of death,
leaving the world to die all over your headstone.
Did you know the boy only about a few hundred yards away, with the grave more expensive than yours?
Would you be jealous that while“SON” is all that is chiseled on your headstone,
like a caretaker’s afterthought,
this other son’s grave is extravagant?
On the neighboring tombstone’s face, made of rich marvel,
decked with more expensive flowers than
ever dressed your death bead,
is the printed image of a boy with Down Syndrome.
At sixteen, dead.
Don’t be envious, for I think perhaps he was like you.
You didn't speak English, perhaps, as your first language.
And he spoke his own language, frustrated because people
couldn't understand him, though he loved them anyway.
And he was loved.
Like I hope you are.
Like I hope you will be.
Loved and adored more than your headstones, defiled with leaves.
June 10th, 2021
By Hannah Dominique Scofield
[Written beside a loved one in Cleveland]
The sky is sea glass;
Soft, round, blue.
Clouds etch it like ocean foam, pulled by the tide away.
Like the anemone and seaweed sprouting from salty rocks,
bristly green trees sway with the air where I'm sitting,
in a park somewhere in Cleveland,
near a basketball court.
Little voices everywhere:
the chirps of birds; the Christmasy jingle of little brunette siblings opening their Raising Canes;
the melodic thud of the basketball on the green textured court—a watery green.
American Chinese food sits in front of me, thick and syrupy and quite honestly a little nasty.
Hard clumps of chicken and the wrong order of rice.
But it tastes like food that maybe could have been made at home by a cook who tried,
but didn't try too hard, but at least tried a little, you know.
And who probably cried by the dishes that she scrubbed the burnt sugar and soy from in the sink after no one in her family liked the supper,
as she considered herself, in the heat of the moment, a culinary failure.
The chicken reminds me of Christmas.
It has this rich, sorta woodsy aftertaste, with a lot of sugar and MSG,
too salty for the sun, except that we are under a gazebo on a juice-stained table,
hearts with A + E and Maddie chalked ok the wooden ceiling with other fading expressions of love.
It will all go away, the affection.
It's written in chalk.
But if it goes away, was it love?
Clover sprouts in the field like snow. Our rental car waits in the lot.
The Polaroid messed up the photo I took…
too much flash.
But the fortune cookies I tried to photograph said:
"Sell your ideas; they are totally acceptable," (mine), and (General Tso order):
"Travels from nesting space will take you to a broader cultural horizon."
What could be broader than this dripping sun that drizzles over the blue world, diluting itself?
Water, water, the sea.
We are its fish, floating between vegetation…
Who is my octopus teacher?
Reunion with a Crush
My mind is busy with you, but my lips know not your name.
And when I try to speak to you,
my words fall guzzling down the drain.
If every now and then, a small sentence rolls from my lips aloud
-- lisped though it may ring--
it burns like poison in the air, daggers hastening to sting, their slashes proud.
For in my heart is penitence;
but from my tongue comes arrogance.
I hear it--the timid pride,
a cape and a mask cloaking my vulnerability--
I speak now to you, crass and loud,
while in my heart you are nobility.
I've bowed to you in ages past,
eager to please your smallest request.
And now, I hide in pride,
wondering if you can catch my anxious lies…
For if my words to you were true,
quiet they'd be, like morning dew,
tears slipping from the rainclouds.
Listen to me. Notice me. Listen to me.
My words would caress you with transitional phrases like, "Remember when…"
My tongue wouldn't tussle with you; it'd hide quietly in its liquid den.
My lips wouldn't fear you; they'd widen to let my thoughts roll out.
But here we are, both of us quiet,
wondering which one of us will first find the other out.
Joyful Shouts on Two Occasions
By Hannah Scofield
[Written for a Stranger at a store and a Best Friend on my Driveway]
The sun is warm.
The birds sing.
Blue sky, wet grass.
And I am happy.
Click here to go to Hannah Dominique’s blog