Water psalms

Abstract

And everything a witness of the buried life. This moment flowing across the sun, this force Of flowers and voices body in body through space. The city of endless cycles of the sun. I speak to you You speak to me --Muriel Rukeyser. The title of my thesis, Water Psalms, embodies both the landscape and the inscape of my poetry. While water serves as the dominant exterior image, and psalms--as repeated mantras--serve as the dominant interior image; the reverse could be said as well. Both water and psalms echo inside and outside the speaker's body and represent the tension between the privately lived life and the publicly lived life. The speaker of these poems struggles to name and invoke a language that will remember, re-claim, and re-define political struggle within the context of her spiritual tradition. The political struggle that she engages in is one to call up the gospel message to witness the oppression of even "the least of these my brethren," as well as to challenge herself and others to live out the gospel call to revolutionary discipleship. The poet is inspired by poet-activists such as Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich who strive to write out of political and spiritual convictions that call the individual and the society to awake and see and hear the anguished and elated voices of "brothers and sisters" joining in endless song. The book is structured to mirror a Lutheran worship service where liturgy was, in effect, the speaker's first knowledge of the power of language. The worship service is the structure by which the speaker learns to process both internal and external experience. The first section of the book, Invocations, invites the sacred presence and establishes the speaker's need and desire to listen to the silence written in "the scripture of the sky." By means of the language she uses, the speaker seeks to clarify and solidify both the internal and external words that cannot be seen, heard, or spoken. In the poem, "Dust," she follows these unspoken and sacred "words into the dark,/ each one a firefly gasping for breath." Essentially, each word is like the firefly that is alternately light and dark. Each word functions as an illumination point for the speaker to follow. The speaker is first baptized by the sacred power of the language she hears in the poem "Scripture" where she says: "I began to hear/ the scriptures/ like water." Yet, she also struggles to make the language of her baptism her own. For example, in the poem "Alpha," the speaker begins to take her inherited language inside, as if she were in a womb, where she uses "budding fingers" to mold her words. But, this process is not an easy one: she writes, "i stumble there, among the gulls/ take first steps .... " The speaker's life, then, becomes a metaphor for her search for her own language. The second section of the book, Epistles, establishes the speaker's family and friends as a spiritual and political body that is inexorably intertwined and interconnected. While the first section of the book focuses more on liturgy, which is a body of repeated rites; the second section moves toward the epistle, which is a letter written from one member of the community to another as in the New Testament. For this reason, several poems in this section are written as letters to relatives and close friends as the means to, as Muriel Rukeyser writes, "speak to you," and also to invite the addressees to "speak to me." The speaker seeks to employ the language of conversation, which will provide informality and allow her the honesty to address her identity and her sense of being alternately accepted and exiled by her own family and faith communities. In this section's final poem, "Resistance," the speaker relates the way her "writing bears witness," or seeks honesty and truth about her life, with "words shedding their old skin," or a sense of exposure and vulnerability. In exposing her identity, her questions, and her resistances, the speaker finally stands naked before her Creator and before her family and faith communities, thereby discovering a renewed sense of the power of language not only to express, but also to communicate. The third section of the book, Offerings, gives, as sacrifice, the moments in which the speaker stands utterly naked within her struggles and moments of healing in familial and romantic relationships. The sacrifices are petitions for forgiveness in some cases and acceptance in others, but always offerings of thanksgiving for the connections that remain despite the struggles. As in the poem "Bread," the speaker seeks to re-imagine the spiritual and emotional symbols of her life--bread, a ring, butterflies--and as in the poem "Fire," to see these symbols as re-made, as "spirit bursting from shell." By re-imagining and re-making these symbols, the speaker attempts to reconcile the more static definitions given such symbols (and therefore language) with the desire to find a new and more dynamic language that allows for multiple layers of definition. This search for a more dynamic language has everything to do with the speaker's ability or lack of ability to stand utterly naked as a sexual being and to celebrate her body's desires. In the poem "A Door," the speaker tells us that "my body is the door I have come through." In other words, she has crossed the threshold between acting on her bodily desires and not acting on them, between an old way of denying the body (connected with the language and emphasis on laws and purification rituals in the Old Testament) and a new way of celebrating the body ( connected with the language and emphasis on unconditional love in the New Testament). She begins to see the ways in which these lines "blur," like the "lines of your body" in the poem "Fire." This new vision makes it possible for the speaker to find something "we can lean toward" in "Waiting for my Sister." The speaker has begun to learn how to live in the blurred spaces, the chasms in which she finds herself, "rising from the hard skin of our life." The fourth section of the book, Benedictions, imparts a final blessing to the speaker's spiritual and political community established in the second section. This benediction is symbolically embodied in the poem "Promise," which reminds the reader of the eternal covenants between God and God's people. The poem "Origins" celebrates these covenants, these "necklaces of words" that bless and bind people together. This section celebrates, but also challenges the inheritance the speaker has received both from her family and from her spiritual tradition. In the poem "Second Meditation," the speaker circles back to the journey begun in "Meditation." Her journey is inward and outward through and in both water and the sacred word. The speaker says, "Words become cairns within my own body," implying that the body is both the bridge and the chasm where the speaker walks the line between an embodied and disembodied language. The language she employs becomes more assertive and direct. For example, in the poem "Lent," the speaker talks about the way that living a disembodied life causes "subtle resistances (to) build/ within one's body, like knotted muscles/ that must someday be untied." Yet, in this same poem, the speaker is transformed by the power of "words made flesh," by "a new covenant made not of iron/ but of water." Finally, the speaker reaches a place where the private and public life are united when she says in the last line of the book: "the wind nearly bursts through my skin."