Wild Nest, No Prison poetry
by Marita O’Neill
For my families and friends who saved me
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
––Czeslaw Milosz
As I drive home, a Ramadan moon, white neon, hangs in a midnight sky, glowing earlobe listening for the sighs
and cries of the world, holding our yearnings, our griefs, eavesdropping on our moments of pleasure. Memory
Moon. Moon of the Hungry City I’ve had to let go. Moon of the Happy Years when my husband and I lived in Istanbul,
ancient city, crumbling beneath our feet. City of Falling Figs, whose purple skins and tear-drop bodies, hang heavy from branches.
Five-fingered fig leaves stretch to shade those old streets and their strays with bony ribs, wagging tails, and pleading eyes.
Skeleton Moon, Holy Moon, witness to restaurant after restaurant: people silent, seated, plates untouched and piled high
with food until prayers called them to eat, break fast, after languid summer days insatiated. Storks in pines nested high during spring there,
lifting their necks, reaching heads back to clack their scissor-like beaks––gesture of longing and abandon. Moon of Storks, Moon of Ruined
Cities and People, Moon of Wandering Strays, listen tonight for our clicking tongues hungry for all that’s just beyond our reach.
There, green parrots prattled in fig trees. Severe hills plunged into the roil and twine of Bosporus currents. There, towns called Kuruçeşme,, Ortaköy, and Bebek slanted and tottered toward water’s edge.
Emerald tails and yellow beaks, parrots chattered about half-lives lived in ancient lands more distant and unfamiliar than Istanbul in a language untranslatable. They flashed through skies like falling stars: green gleam against wide blue.
In that place, my husband and I burned down to our marriage’s half-life and didn’t know how quickly our own flash and dive was fading into a gloaming turned night. Don’t go back to sleep, Rumi pleaded of a lover. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
During Ramadan, at 4 am a drummer beat and called the faithful to wake, yelling as if the world were ending: rise, eat, be full before the fast, before long days of want.
We fell into dreams incoherent, stuffed with the music of parrots and a drum that shook us like a primeval thunder. It beat and thrummed, Don’t go back to sleep. Don’t go back to sleep.
Teachers and students stood disordered, jumbled in the parking lot for a school drill. My Turkish colleagues remembered the quake of ‘99: 7.5, 17,000 killed. Stories tumbled––
my friend said, All but one wall fell, my bedroom wall, so I lived; the history teacher said he still hears the snap of city streets, still dreams of hillsides falling away chunk by chunk.
For weeks after the drill, my students told their stories. Stories broken and jagged––the way memory cracks, cleaves what was into parts real and imagined. While the world falls
beneath us again and again, we try to take hold of what’s solid, what’s shifting, what rises up from memory and mud. Some students were too young to remember anything except night running, pajamas,
an open field where they stood watching apartment fronts fall. It’s like a Buster Keaton moment: one man left standing––building facade around his ankles, dust flying, making us laugh
to be alive, to be the one who survived. All the while Dickinson reminds us that memory steps around––across––upon these rough places because an open eye would drop us bone by bone
as if the trance of time and forward motion like an equation could keep us from remembering all those quakes we’ve lived that sooner or later ask us to open our eyes, claim rubble and shard, and rise.
In the last year before you died, you kept all the lights ablaze in the house. All the lampshades disappeared, broke, or burned.
Visiting once, I sat on a lightbulb stuffed in a couch cushion and found them hidden behind closet towels, tucked behind the coffee maker. But who knew you were leaving so soon? Who knew it was a different darkness you were keeping at bay?
I couldn’t blame you for needing the companionship of light. Thinking you’d be back from the hospital within a week, you stuffed odd papers into The Intimate Thomas Merton: a bill for car brakes, a note from a friend: see you Monday!, and a passage
marked and starred: “All things stir by night, waking or sleeping, conscious of the nearness of their ruin.” At the funeral, I wanted to fill your casket with poems, to tuck words––bright, blaze, beam––between your stiffened fingers, into your sleeves, beneath the pillow where your hair, still soft and familiar, rested whitely. But the casket too suddenly closed, leaving the expanse––the place that leaves us
standing where words fall short, where prayers yearn to be heard, and a dark leaves us bereft with no light from the candle’s tongue.
At first only one Great White Stork labored above the hills. Navigating formidable Bosporus winds, the gull seemed blown off course. But suddenly the sky was all wings,
hundreds, plodding: white, black-tipped, wide as a heron’s. They moved along the green lushness of the hills, following steep curves and currents. Not like the geese back home,
their patterns neat and triangular. Instead they mimicked people bumping into each other like refugees, haphazard and jostled, compelled to follow that call: move forward, find home, leave
and leave and leave. They filled the sky, tracing the rising slopes of the Turkish hillsides with their wings. When my father died, I mixed up the verb “died”––öldü with the verb “lived”––yaşadı,
so I told friends in pidgin Turkish: My father lived. Then, the line between what it meant to live and to die seemed impossible to trace, impossible to know where the dead lived and the living
resumed, shrouded and tipped with black. I watched the last storks lumber over hills, their bodies disappearing one by one until they faded into that fog between living and memory.
On the news, the man points to the hole, the prison wall where they escaped. It’s Kandahar. He points at the void, explaining what’s gone— a long darkness gapes: 360 meters and just wide enough to wiggle through impossible weights of earth.
In Istanbul, the people say, Inşallah, and shrug as if a way out is always a possibility, one way or another. When they say, Maşallah, something’s to be celebrated,
but not so much to curse the luck before it’s given legs, a chance to squint in the sunlight. It’s the Maşallah that makes us smile––good guys or bad guys––when the escape happens. It’s the sucking in of breath just before, just in case soldiers loom at the other end, just in case slave catchers lounge and smoke at the gates of the railroad. Hidden in a cargo crate labeled “dry goods,”
Henry “Box” Brown shipped himself from slavery in Virginia to Sunlight Unshackled, singing the Psalms as they pried open his freedom. It’s why, when Oedipus flees Corinth, some tunnel inside us breaks, collapses in, makes us gasp for air, hoping fate’s dice will fall just once the other way,
even though we know the odds. As I hold you, love, taste your breath heavy with wine mid-day,
I feel the earth pressing in, our palms upturned. We hold up the ceiling, listen for cracks. What waits in the darkness?
We have no maps. No candle. No song from the old days. But we have shovel, spoon, cup.
And we have this––an Inşallah, a shrug, something bolder than the weight––as we hold our breaths and dig.
When I lived in Istanbul, there were many questions I couldn’t ask or answer. One hot afternoon I went to the funeral of a friend’s ex who drank himself to death.
There was a strange casualness––all of us milling around the mosque courtyard waiting for the imam. The body lay swaddled in white, in a plain, unfinished box. A woman
approached with tiny paper photos of the dead man in black and white, no bigger than a postage stamp. My friend whispered in English, Pin the photo to your heart. All afternoon,
as we talked and waited, his eyes, sincere and shocked, stared out at us as if he too was surprised by this turn, this strange way loss leaves us wondering at its stubborn refusal to allow
for an alternate translation, allow for anything but disbelief. But now, I yearn for the custom, especially after it all––the moving out, the empties in the car, your wedding ring
off without telling me. What if after a loss not death we pinned photos of dear ones––lost or half-lost––to our chests? As if to say: he’s not dead, but he’s never coming back, never.
Flamenco: Traveling to Seville
Striking the wood with the heart of her foot, curling her arms till her hands soar like birds, the dancer commands the stage. Angry and sullen,
the summer closes in until we are all sweat and heat––audience, dancer, singer, and guitar––doors lock, shutters close, all cameras are banished to prepare
for the dance: a fire unconfined and lashing. Pointed like horns, her arms stretch, fingers snap. Bull-like she surges, plunging and twirling
into the invisible that must be fought back. Hard on the floor with her heels, she strikes the wood like an unrelenting fist. Startling as lightning, her feet
do not stop until the rain-like tumult of the rhythms, the clapping of the singer draw us into a part of ourselves we had forgotten. She slaps her thighs, kicks,
caresses her curves. She lifts her dress up the edges of her legs and moves its twirling mass just as a storm commands leaves to dance, sway, and rock
with the urgency of wind. Eyes riveted to the dancer’s feet, the singer answers her heels. His voice is a buried muezzin risen from graves of Spain’s past, the laments
of Roma and Jews, tortured and long banished. It calls to a feral thing that will not relent, calls the dancer to stir even after the singing’s stopped.
Suddenly, silence and stillness. The dancer’s chest heaves until her heels come alive again: they pop and snap as if they are their own being. Whatever
the devil might be, this dance, dance of the flame self, dance of the urgent voice, dance of the forgotten now risen, this is the dance that will make him cower.
Notes & Acknowledgments
A heartfelt thank you to Jeffrey Haste at Deerbrook Editions for his faith in this manuscript.
The title of the book “Wild Nest, No Prison” quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’, “The Caged Skylark“ in his collection The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie. Additionally, I use some words from another Hopkins poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” He writes, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame . . . .”
The epigraph quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s, “Dedication,” from his The Collected Poems 19311987, published by The Ecco Press.
All the quotes in “The Pardoner’s Tale” are the words of the Pardoner in his prologue to his tale. The translation used is from Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website “The Pardoner’s Prologue, Introduction, and Tale.”
The kenning “dawn scorcher” in “The Dragon” poem comes from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
The quote “Listening to a witness makes you a witness” in my poem “Witness” is from Elie Wiesel. The events in the poem “Witness” were reported by NPR on November 15, 2019 in their article “Remembering The 1989 Massacre Of Jesuits In El Salvador.” The events of the “Witness” poem took place 36 years ago, so I can only say that this was the story as it was told to me. While I have not been able to verify this story from news reports, I had no reason to doubt the truth of what the priest told us as a friend of the slain Jesuits.
“Sublimation” was in response to a photo by Charles Brooks Yanagisawa 1980s Saxophone, Part 2, which shows the inside of a saxophone. The poem “Trumpet’s Lament” was also inspired by Brooks’ photos of the insides of instruments.
“Lake Isle of Innisfree” borrows its title from the William Butler Yeats poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Several of the phrases and words in my poem are also from Yeats’ poem.
“Lost at Sea” was written, in part, as a response to the news of the cargo ship El Faro that was lost at sea with her crew of thirty-three on October 1, 2015, after steaming into the eye of Hurricane Joaquin. Several of the crew members were from Maine.
“Arsonist’s Blues” mentions Portland, Maine’s Great Fire of 1866. Most of the information in the poem about the fire comes from the Greater Portland Landmark’s website article “Portland’s Great Fire of 1866.”
“Anthem for a Doomed Youth” borrows its title from Wilfred Owen’s poem. The quote in my poem is also from the Owen poem.
Many thanks to my two writers’ groups. Their insights and honesty are a gift to me, and their help, suggestions, and acuity are woven into each and every poem here. I feel very blessed and grateful for their warmth and community. So much gratitude to my May
“Migration” and “In One Scenario”: The Cafe Review
“The Dragon,” “Half-Life,” “Trumpets Lament,” and “Late March Moon”: Maine Arts Journal––Union of Maine Visual Artists Quarterly
“The Pardoner’s Tale”: Read to Me Some Poem: 20 Years of Longfellow Days Poems, edited by Maryli Tienmann and Alice Persons and published by MoonPie Press.
“At the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia”: Maine Public Radio’s “Poems from Here” with help from the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance
“Dear Dragon,”: deLuge Journal