Poems for Abuse Victims

Having attended a memorial ceremony for the recently departed poet Lucille Clifton this past Saturday (see yesterday’s post), today I commemorate her by putting some of her poems to good use. Catholic priest molestation has been in the news recently (less the molestation, which tragically occurs in all walks of life, than the church’s failure to discipline guilty priests), so I’m posting today on poems that can help the victims. The recent issue of Newsweek argues that women, were they to be given more power in the Catholic church, could save the church because they would focus more on supporting these victims (and protecting future potential victims) than on protecting the institution of the church. Lucille’s poems give a sense of what an empathetic woman can offer.

Lucille was felt up by her father when she was a girl. Over the years she has used poetry to help deal with the psychological effects. As a result, she appears to have emerged relatively healthy and not defined by bitterness.

For years, Lucille hid what happened. In “forgiving my father” (1980) she writes, “daddy daddy old lecher/old liar,” in a passage that appears to refer to the incidents. But the passage could also refer to his adultery with regard to her mother, meaning that she may not yet be entirely facing up to what happened. Criticizing him for his treatment of her mother may be a proxy for his treatment of herself. She is also too prepared, at this point, to offer excuses for him. The lady in the poem is her recently deceased mother:

i wish you were rich so i could take it all
and give the lady what she was due
but you were the son of a needy father,
the father of a needy son;
you gave her all you had
which was nothing. You have already given her
all you had.

I don’t see this as real forgiveness.  One can’t forgive before one has acknowledged what needs forgiving.  Lucille took on that challenge some seven years later in her “shapeshifter poems.” There she talks about a father (she doesn’t yet say that it is hers) turning into a shapeshifter and entering his daughter’s room. The images break the heart, especially those that describe the little girl feeling alone and at the end of the world:

the legend is whispered
in the women’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them

2

who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue who who who the owl
laments into the evening who
will protect her this prettylittlegirl

3

if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up

4

the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world

Once one begins acknowledging what happened, however indirectly, the act starts to lose some of its power. As the years went by, Lucille began talking about the abuse much more directly, as in “moonchild,” written 13 years later.  She imagines a scene that foreshadows the later abuse, her father cradling her when she is still in her mother’s womb.  The moon that the pregnant belly resembles will become the moon, which is to say the natural forces, that turn her father into a shapeshifter.  As silent witness, the moon could also be her mother, the silent witness who won’t intervene when she is molested.  Both parents needs forgiving:

whatever slid into my mother’s room that
late june night, tapping her great belly,
summoned me out roundheaded and unsmiling.
is this the moon, my father used to grin.
cradling me? it was the moon
but nobody knew it then.

the moon understands dark places.
the moon has secrets of her own.
she holds what light she can.

we girls were ten years old and giggling
in our hand-me-downs. we wanted breasts,
pretended that we had them, tissued
our undershirts. jay johnson is teaching
me to french kiss, ella bragged, who
is teaching you? how do you say; my father?

the moon is queen of everything.
she rules the oceans, rivers, rain.
when I am asked whose tears these are
I always blame the moon.

As she gains more courage to face up to what has happened to her, Lucille explores the different dimensions of the abuse.  The moon is her focal point. Her father’s death appears to have been an important moment in the process.  He is the coalminer’s son and the man who killed the bear in the following poem:

the man who killed the bear

only after the death
of the man who killed the bear,
after the death of the coalminer’s son,
did i remember that the moon
also rises, coming heavy or thin
over the living fields, over
the cities of the dead;
only then did i remember how she
catches the sun and keeps most of him
for the evening that surely will come;
and it comes.
only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.

The moon, of course, does not generate light but only catches the light of the sun. Lucille holds on to that fact, telling herself that she can catch on to the light of the sun in even the darkest times of times. In other words, she doesn’t need to be the sun. All she needs is “some small light” for life and dance to return to the interior cities of the dead.

Someone at the memorial service called Lucille Clifton “fearless,” which another speaker amended to “brave.” The correction was appropriate because Lucille in fact was filled with fears. Who could not be with such a life? But she had the courage to face up to them. In her poetry, she assures us that we can all be brave.