In “1066” Dawn Potter gives us a different version of being stuck. It’s cultural, political, environmental. There is the Norman Conquest, there is some kind of blight taking the produce of the land and its people. It seems there is plague as well. The speaker takes us from all the promises of summer to a devastating blight. Where there had been vegetables there is rot, where there had been a family, the speaker is now alone. Where there had been shirts to wash, beating them against rocks, there are rags. This isn’t writer’s block, it is a culture being shattered and described to us through the voice of a young woman in all the perplexity the situation creates.
In this second poem, “The Voyage Out,” Potter gives us another version of what it means to be stuck as the neighborhood watches a family crisis unfolding. What had entrapped this family? What was the father stuck in that led him to violence? What not knowing, what helplessness, did the neighbors experience, able to do nothing but witness? And how long will such an event haunt their lives? There is that dreadful state of imagining the worst, then finding out it is true. And yet the natural world (so far) goes on—the lake, the trees, the birds . . . When the speaker asks who sang in this space and who listened, it seems she is asking on multiple levels—who listened to the healing powers of the natural world, who listened to the distress in this family, who sang of their troubles, who offered them the possibility of succor, of peace? And how can the lapping of the lake, the sun in the trees, and the red-wings offer solace, if we listen?
Dawn Potter is the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry. Her most recent book of poems is Calendar, 2024, Deerbrook Editions. She directs poetry and teaching programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland.
Betsy Sholl, MAJ Poetry editor
1066
The cabbage beds are thriving at midsummer.
The fields around the abbey shimmer in sunlight.
Rain falls often, and a breeze trembles the barley.
In the stream we beat shirts against stones.
Under a tree a man in rusty armor eats a plum.
The abbot asks Our Lady to mend a chapel wall,
and his prayers attract a throng of wasps.
A sudden blight sickens five infants.
We look away from their wan faces.
Knights on horseback chatter orders
in a strange and silly tongue.
We want to laugh but don’t.
A cabbage shows signs of rot.
Our new sister frets and Mother
sags against the doorpost. We picture
plums as we swab dark dabbles of blood.
At night, smoke rises from the archers’ camp.
Rot has invaded the abbey fields.
Mother would be pulling young turnips
if she weren’t groaning with fever.
We pull the turnips ourselves.
A friar complains about sin
and no one listens.
In the stream we beat shirts against stones.
Two knights ride up to the water’s edge.
Their swords clank like cracked bells.
We are beating shirts.
But now there is only I.
Over the blackened cabbages
a legion of crows wheels and settles.
There is no use in beating these shirts.
These shirts are rags.
The Voyage Out
It was the not knowing that day.
It was the not knowing all day long
if they were dead or alive,
if he were still marching around
the darkened kitchen flaunting
his rifle, his children huddled
on the linoleum, his wife
spread-eagled against the stove.
It was the not knowing:
imagining the worst before
the worst turned out to be true.
And then it was the fear of
how it might have happened:
whose blood sprayed first,
who had eyes to see it.
And yet all day, outside that house,
beyond the police cars and the swat team
beyond the frantic grandparents
and the neighbors stiff with horror;
beyond all of us, the friends, the townsfolk,
stunned by dread—
A lake lapped against a pebbled beach.
Pines and tamaracks nodded to the summer sun.
Red-winged blackbirds slipped among the greening reeds.
All these years later,
I ask, I still ask:
Who sang in the quiet spaces?
Who listened?
Jane Page-Conway, Birds, infrared photograph, 2023.