Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Joseph Bathanti: Women’s Prison
Two Sundays a month, darkness still abroad,
we round up the kids and bundle them
into a restored salvaged Bluebird school bus,
repainted green, and make the long haul
to Raleigh where their mothers are locked
in Women’s Prison. We pin the children’s names,
and numbers, to their coats, count them
like convicts at lights-out. Sucking thumbs,
clutching favorite oddments to cuddle as they ride
curled in twos on patched sprung benches,
they sleepwalk bashfully, the little aged,
into the belly of the bus, eyes nailed to its floor.
We feed them milk and juice, animal crackers, apples;
stop for them to use the bathroom,
and to change the ones so young, they can’t help wetting.
We try singing: folk tunes and strike ballads –
as if off to picket or march with an army of babies –
but their stony faces will not yield and, finally,
their passion to disappear puts them to sleep,
not to wake until the old Bluebird jostles
through the checkpoints into the prison.
Somehow, upon reopening their eyes, they know
to smile at the twirling jagged grandeur
surrounding the massive compound: concertina –
clotted with silver scraps of dew and dawn light,
a bullet-torn shroud of excelsior, scored
in dismal fire, levitating in the savage
Sabbath sky. By then, their mothers,
in the last moments of girlish rawboned glory,
appear in baggy, sky-blue prison shifts,
their beautiful hands lifting to shield their eyes,
like saints about to be slaughtered,
as if the light is too much, the sky suddenly egg-blue,
plaintive, threatening to pale away, the sun
still invisible, yet blinding. Barefoot, weepy,
they call their babies by name and secret endearment,
touch them everywhere like one might the awakened dead.
The children remain dignified, nearly aloof
in their perfect innocence, and self-possession,
toddling dutifully, into the arms of anyone
who reaches for them, even the guards, petting them too.
When visiting hours conclude, the children hand
their mothers cards and drawings, remnants
of a life they are too young to remember,
but conjure in glyphic crayon blazes.
Attempting to recollect the narrative
that will guide them back to their imagined homes,
the mothers peer from the pictures to the departing
children – back and forth, straining
to make the connection, back
and forth until the children, already fast asleep
as the bus spirits them off, disappear.
~
Author’s note: I’ve spent a lot of time teaching in prisons and writing about them over the years; and, these days, custody and how it erases and demonizes people is coming to roost in palpable and terrifying ways across the U.S. and beyond.
~~~~
Copyright 2013 Joseph Bathanti. From Concertina (Mercer University Press, 2013).
Joseph Bathanti was North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and the recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and is the recipient of the Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024.
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
😭😭😭😭😭
LikeLike
What a moving and powerful poem! In this case, the comments are also worth reading because they show so well that humanity is not dead. Thank you, Joe, for writing this, thank you for posting it, and thank you all for your comments.
LikeLike
I cannot thank you enough, Michael, for giving us this poem, its pain and beauty, its testimony, its humbling weight.
LikeLike
Joseph’s instincts are spot on, aren’t they?
>
LikeLike
Thank you and godspeed, Joseph, my friend. A stirring evocation of a sad, sad situation. I too have long had dealings with female inmates, and one of the most depressing things I discovered from the get-go was that many of these prisoners were there because they had been drug mules or otherwise abetted their male partners. If we need to find villains, it’s the men we should punish.
LikeLike
This is one of the saddest and most important poems I have read – the inhumanity of separating women and their children breaks my heart. Deep thanks to Joseph and to Michael for sharing this.
LikeLike
Thank you, Jan. I’m so glad you are contributing to these pages.
>
LikeLike
This really resonates with me. Four years ago I set up a writing program at our county jail. I’ve been so moved by my students’ stories. Some of them are tragedies, mostly they are victims of their own hearts. Some of them didn’t have a chance. We’re putting together an anthology of their work now. My graduate students teach the classes as well. You know the justice system is flawed going in, but working with these women has really brought it home. Thank you so much for this poem, Joe.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Very important work, Barbara. Thank you!
>
LikeLike
For those Interested, btw, Shelton’s book is “Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer.”
LikeLike
Thanks, Matt.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
My absurdist carceral event occurred while I was imprisoned in Yuma in the mid nineties, when my mom had driven down from Phoenix on a food-visit day with a steak she cooked herself and all the trimmings. Upon arrival, however, they refused her entry because she was wearing a sleeveless shirt, in Arizona, as if the sight of my mother’s elderly biceps would have driven the other prisoners into a lustful frenzy replete with escape. They also refused to let her drive into town, buy a shirt, and come back, nor would they lend her one. Instead they left me sitting in the bleachers, spruced up in my Sunday prison best, all for naught.
My best convict memory, however, was in 2001 in Tucson, when I got to attend a few workshops with poet and then-U of A Professor Richard Shelton, who told me pointedly that reading my poetry felt like being hit over the head with a hammer. Despite this, it was a highlight of my incarceration adventures, and kudos to those whose volunteering inside prisons lets in a bit of light, and doubly so for those who compose poems about it.
LikeLike
This poem touched me deeply. It expresses so many emotions masterfully and caringly. A most unusual, excellent poem. One I won’t forget. My husband worked with women imprisoned here in Peru. It never occurred to me to write a poem about them. And now there is THIS ONE that says it all.
LikeLiked by 2 people
In the US, many poets and addiction sponsors work with prisoners. I’ve tried it and have enormous respect for the people who are good at this kind of outreach.
>
LikeLike
Early in my career as a social worker I worked in two max security prisons. I worked tirelessly to keep inmates connected to their children. As a poet, I have never written about this work. Thank you Joe for this beautiful poem, this beautiful sorrow.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Such an important, sad, necessary and deeply moving poem. Like Sean, I am in awe of the heart in these lines. I too have great admiration for this poet.
LikeLiked by 3 people
gre
LikeLiked by 1 person
Joe is great, isn’t he? He raises gentle compassion to the level of song.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
great poem, as usual from Joe
LikeLiked by 1 person
what a masterpiece of a poem, so tragically and all beautifully rendered. He is great poet and this is a great poem. There is further commendation to give for the poem’s living context, whether it sought out this writer or vice versa (or both) but he is up to his nape in difficult life and it has been a reward to his development as a writer and human being. I am in awe. I am grateful!
LikeLiked by 2 people
This poem was earned by steady dedication to public service, close observation of an unfamiliar world and courageous listening to the poem as it was offered to him. I admire this poem and this poet tremendously.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you all so very much for taking the time to write such kind things, and my hats off to you all and especially Michael (what a work ethic) and Vox Populi to provide this rather breathtaking daily dawn delivery of poems and commentary to us all. What’s more, I find so very many writers among us, all over this country, and in others, who enter prisons, and shelters, and hospitals and other places where the immured suffer and languish to teach and take their writing – and gently coax from those folks their own crucial stories – in the service of shared humanity. Thank you all so much for your good work, your good poems, your good hearts.
Peace,
Joe
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank YOU, Joe.
>
LikeLike
Ditto!
LikeLike