For My Son, A Kind of Prayer

December 21st, 2012 § 2 comments

(Author’s note: This poem was orig­i­nally pub­lished at The Good Men Project. I am post­ing it here so that peo­ple read­ing this other post–which con­tains all the back­ground infor­ma­tion – who don’t want to click through to TGMP’s site can read the poem if they’re inter­ested. Also, this piece con­tains explicit descrip­tions of sex­ual violence.)
 
********************************

For My Son, A Kind of Prayer

…for they know
Of some most haughty deed or thought
That waits upon his future days…

—William But­ler Yeats, “A Prayer for My Son”

 

Just before his mother
pushed him through her­self
hard enough to split who she was
wide enough for him to enter the world,
I touched the top of my son’s head;
and after he was born,
the mid­wife — her name,
I think, was Vivian—
held my wife’s umbil­i­cal cord
in a loop for me to cut, which I did,
free­ing our new boy’s body
to enter the name
we had wait­ing for him;
and then Vivian laid him
against the curve of his mother’s body,
giv­ing him to the breast
he would for years
define his world by;
and once that first taste of love
was firmly lodged within him,
she bun­dled him tight,
placed him in my arms
and, while I sang his wel­come
in a far cor­ner of the room,
turned to assist the doc­tor
sewing up my wife’s
birth-torn flesh.

I don’t remem­ber what song I chose,
and it’s been a decade at least
since I’ve told any­one
about my son’s first moments
as my son, but they’ve come to me here,
in this urologist’s wait­ing room,
because I picked up from the cof­fee table
the copy of The Nation
another patient must have left behind,
and the first arti­cle my eyes fell on,
“Silence=Rape,” by Jan Good­win,
intro­duced me to Shashir,
six years old and gang raped
in the Congo. When they found her,
she was starv­ing;
and when they found her,
she could nei­ther walk nor talk;
and so they stitched together
the parts of her the men had rup­tured,
fed her, gave her cloth­ing;
and that night she slept
for the first time since no one knew when
in a bed that was not
the bush the mili­tia left her to die in;
and maybe the tent walls
shap­ing the room she lived in
when Good­win learned she existed
had come to mean for her
a kind of safety; and maybe
that safety was fer­tile ground,
where words for what the men had done to her,
dropped like seeds from the mouths
of those who res­cued her,
could begin to take root.
From what Good­win wrote,
I can­not tell.

I have not been gang raped,
but a man much older than I was
when I was twelve
forced his penis into my mouth,
seared the back of my throat
with what he poured out of him­self
and sealed into silence
every­thing that took me
fif­teen years of push­ing
till who I was split wide enough
that who I am
could speak his first true words.
Mr. New­man? The nurse,
white, blond, about my age,
calls my name,
one of the few she has not butchered,
sit­ting as I am among the men
of my neigh­bor­hood,
where names that would twist
the tongue of any Eng­lish speaker
are com­mon. I put Shashir’s story down,
though Goodwin’s piece
is about more than her:
Maria was sev­enty
when the Inter­a­hamwe
tied her legs apart
like a goat before slaugh­ter;
and the women Good­win leaves name­less,
most of them killed by infec­tion,
their labia pierced and pad­locked
when their rapists were fin­ished—
this nar­ra­tive is theirs too.

I put the mag­a­zine down,
still bear­ing those women with me,
and rise towards the door I need to walk through
so I can place in this doctor’s hand
the left tes­ti­cle I found a bump on
three days ago. A few
of my fel­low patients
glance up as I pass,
one of them smil­ing,
nod­ding his head,
as if to say, Don’t worry.
It’ll all work out.

I smile back, grate­ful
for his small empa­thy,
notic­ing as I do so
that the flag pin on his lapel
and the name of the news­pa­per
folded over in his lap
place his ori­gin in,
or at least his alle­giance to,
a coun­try now mak­ing head­lines
for sto­ries like Shashir’s;
and of course such things
don’t hap­pen only
“over there;” and of course
not one man in this room
has ever done enough,
could ever do enough,
to make them stop hap­pen­ing;
and as the truth of that,
the guilt of that, punches me
in the stom­ach, this place—
where our penises are just penises,
and our balls are glands,
noth­ing more—
becomes in my imag­i­na­tion
where we are sup­posed to be,
a kind of pur­ga­tory
preg­nant with poetic justice.

The door shuts behind me.
The nurse turns a per­fect about face,
toss­ing over her shoul­der
one last grin and Please, fol­low me,
before lead­ing the way in silence
to a room dom­i­nated
by a four-color poster
and a plas­tic cross-section
of the flac­cid human male gen­i­talia.
The poster, I notice,
includes the fore­skin; the model
does not — some­thing
to ask the doc­tor about—
but when he arrives,
my only thought
resem­bles a prayer.

I have not prayed in decades,
and gave up the god I prayed to
soon after I stopped,
but while he snaps
his latex gloves on,
and I let my pants
fall to my ankles,
my under­wear
to just below my knees,
and as I watch him han­dle
what in my wife’s lan­guage
are called my tokhm
or “eggs,” the sce­nario
I’ve been try­ing not to con­jure
gnaws at the edge of my calm.
With­out gonads, who would I be?

It’s prob­a­bly noth­ing,
the doc­tor nods sagely,
step­ping back,
remov­ing his gloves.
I pull my cloth­ing up,
tuck in my shirt. Still,
he con­tin­ues while I’m
fum­bling with my zip­per,
let’s check it again
six months from now. He smiles,
offers his hand for me to shake,
which I do, and moves on
to the next man in the next room.
I head back out the way I came,
where my friend smiles and nods again,
lift­ing his hand in a farewell
I answer with my own nod and smile,
the reprieve I’ve just got­ten
pre­dis­pos­ing me not to assume
the worst of any­one, though that assump­tion
was once my only refuge,
the way I imag­ine
Shashir bur­row­ing into silence
as the life she’d sur­vived her ordeal
to enter.

Out­side, the wind
rips the hood
away from my head;
snow-gusts slap me
back and forth
across my face;
and I am reminded how quickly
beauty turns cold, how eas­ily
death wears friendship’s face.
I want to know
how a man who loves his chil­dren
does not see their faces
in the eyes of the girl
whose vagina he is open­ing
with a bot­tle or a bay­o­net;
I want to know how their voices
woven into that girl’s screams
do not par­a­lyze his hands
or keep his penis soft.

My son will never know Shashir,
but he will know men
who could’ve been,
who’d gladly be,
among the ones
who vio­lated her;
and he’ll know women,
and other men like me,
whose bod­ies carry
vio­la­tion within them.

One day, he will  be forced to choose
where his alle­giance lies.
These words are for him
on the day of that decision.

 

§ 2 Responses to For My Son, A Kind of Prayer"

Tell me what you think...

What's this?

You are currently reading For My Son, A Kind of Prayer at Richard Jeffrey Newman.

meta

%d bloggers like this: