By H. E. Casson
for Tarana Burke
Your whisper met with stone and echoed back
“A cave is not a prison,” ricocheted
Ancestors live in each abraded crack
A line from renegade to renegade
I see your eyes are tired, heart is sore
Body bearing scar and gash and grit
In counting these eleven years and more
For all the voices to escape the pit
But thunder brings deluge to drown them out
And scavengers come picking at their bones
The repercussion grows into a shout
A hundred thousand you-are-not-alones
And even as my echoes hit the wall
I’m thankful that you chose to speak at all
H. E. Casson lives in a very small house in Toronto with one human, no pets and 28 plants. They are a library technician and writer whose work has been published in Room, Cricket, Jones Av., (EX)Cite, Smart Moves, and Today’s Parent Toronto, among others.
Poet’s note: When I chose to use the classic form of the sonnet, I realized that, even though sonnet means little song, it sounds male. I imagined the line of daughters going back generations, much the way we have linked histories father to son. As a bit of an aside to myself, I started calling my poem a daughteret instead of a sonnet. This made me think about how quickly women and genderqueer people are mocked for creating words that include us or scratch at the surface of the status quo. I see criticisms that our words are “made up” as though the existing words sprung from nature or were handed down by god. Daughteret is an organic expression of an idea I had when writing about a woman who takes care of so many daughters. When I realized the poem needed a name, I could think of nothing better than to share a word that grew out of my admiration for her.
Photo credit: Lynn Friedman via a Creative Commons license.
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