21 Haiku for Odetta on Valentine's Day
February 14, 2014
Taking inspiration from the 30 Days of Love campaign that we wrote about earlier this week, we're redefining love this year to mean something larger, more humanitarian, something that can encompass fellowship, art, justice, and beauty.
Sonia Sanchez has done just that in her collection Morning Haiku, a collection pulsing with life and music and raw humanity. And it is full of the simple wonderment of poetry, as she describes in the book's preface, meditating on the power of the haiku, “It's something to find yourself in a poem—to discover the beauty that i knew resided somewhere....” It might be tempting to focus on the aural similarity of “morning” to “mourning” in the title, and indeed several of the poems are tributes to departed friends, artists, and musicians. But Sanchez knows that real beauty is complex, deep enough to contain both loss and renewal, and that duality is where life, hence love, resides.
In the poem below, Sanchez celebrates the life of Odetta, the singer and human rights activist who inspired a generation of folk musicians and became the “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement.” It's a poem, like many of the poems in Morning Haiku, of abiding admiration, spirit, and love.
21 haiku
(for Odetta)
1.
The sound of
your voice thundering out
of the earth
2.
a drum
beat summoning us
to prayer
3.
behold
the smell of
your breathing
4.
dilated
by politics
you dared to love
5.
you opened
up your throat
to travellers
6.
exhaled
Lead Belly on Saturday
nites and Sunday mornings
7.
your music asked:
has your song a father
or a mother?
8.
on stage
you were a
soldier of hands
9.
accenting
beat after beat
into beauty
10.
you asked: is there
no song that will
bring rain to this desert?
11.
you unveiled
your voice at early
demonstrations
12.
saluted our
blood until we were
no longer strangers
13.
waltzed our
eyes until we danced
from chandeliers
14.
your songs journeyed
in a country padlocked
with greed
15.
a country
still playing on
adolescent knees
16.
suddenly the morning
takes you back another
time another continent
17.
where stones
contacted stars told
us hello and goodbye
18.
finally we remember
how you gave life
to memory
19.
remember your eyes
morning stars
perfumed with rain
20.
your mouth
a sweet wind
painted with hieroglyphics
21.
finally to pass
your song into our
ancestral rivers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sonia Sanchez—award-winning poet, activist, scholar, and formerly the Laura Carnell professor of English and women's studies at Temple University—is the author of sixteen books, including Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Does Your House Have Lions?, Wounded in the House of a Friend, and Shake Loose My Skin. You can find her on Facebook or on her website at www.soniasanchez.net.