Vox Populi
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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: One Day
Love Song for the Newly Divorced
.
One day, you will awake from your covering
and that heart of yours will be totally mended,
and there will be no more burning within.
The owl, calling in the setting of the sun
and the deer path, all erased.
And there will be no more need for love
or lovers or fears of losing lovers
and there will be no more burning timbers
with which to light a new fire,
and there will be no more husbands or people
related to husbands, and there will be no more
tears or reason to shed your tears.
You will be as mended as the bridge
the working crew has just reopened.
The thick air will be vanquished with the tide
and the river that was corrupted by lies
will be cleansed and totally free.
And the rooster will call in the setting sun
and the sun will beckon homeward,
hiding behind your one tree that was not felled.
Copyright 2020 Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. From Praise Song for my Children: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press, 2020).
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, including, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, and her 2003 Crab Orchard Award collection, Becoming Ebony. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including, Prairie Schooner, Transition, New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, Harvard Divinity Review, and her work has been translated into several languages. She immigrated with her family after surviving two years of the fourteen-year series of Liberian civil wars. She is the winner of the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for her book, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s newest book, “Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry,”forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 2023,” is the first comprehensive body of literature from Liberia since that nation’s independence in 1847. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.
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What a wonderful poem Patricia! Congratulations and more congratulations.
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Thank you for your comment! Yes, it is a wonderful poem. — Michael Simms
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Beautiful poem, another fine writer all new and given to me by this site for which I’m grateful!
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Thanks, Sean. I’ve published a number of books by Patrcia. She is a Liberian-American original!
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did my comment disappear? Does what if ever disappear? Does knowing you are strong and can do it by yourself ever really replace what went missing?
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Love this. But I have yet to see totally mended and not sure, no matter how strong you become, if that little what if ever goes away
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Thanks, Barbara. Eva just told me she sees this poem as being about death, not divorce. Interesting.
>
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And I have seen both. First husband, violent alcoholic, but with much beauty, divorced then he died in a speedboat race. Second, less adventurous, slow torture of Parkinson’s to death
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Oh, my, Barbara, these were your two husbands?
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Yes
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A powerful poem, Patricia, — lyrical, driving, liberating
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