Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Last year, a group of poets celebrated the 250th anniversary book publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) by Phillis Wheatley Peters. Phillis was brought over from Africa on the ship for which she was named, and subsequently purchased by a prominent Boston family. The Wheatleys gave Phillis an unprecedented education that included the study of the Classics, the Bible, Greek, Latin, Astronomy, Geography, and History. By the age of 12, Phillis garnered attention from religious and political leaders throughout the colonies. Phillis Wheatley Peters’ book of poetry would be the very first published in English by a writer of African descent. And thus begins an important pillar of American literature.

In honor of this important milestone editors Danielle Legros Georges and Artress Bethany White solicited Black female poets to write in the manner of Phillis Wheatley, or creatively reinscribe what is found in the text as some of her abiding images and important themes.

Her poems exhibit a great deal of learning; she addresses questions of faith and the possibilities of freedom. For abolitionists, her book would prove the lie of an inferior intelligence. As June Jordan says in her essay collection Some of Us Did Not Die, “How should there be Black poets in America? It was not natural. And she was the first. It was 1761—so far back before the revolution that produced these United States, so far back before the concept of freedom disturbed the insolent crimes of this continent.”

The anthology, Wheatley at 250, from which today’s poem is taken, honors and celebrates the immense legacy of Phillis Wheatley Peters, whose work matters to all of us who cherish the possibilities of poems and poets to represent the highest ideals of literacy, and the miracle of language to free us.

On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age,
a reinscription
by Aracelis Girmay

crossed through * this spectrum of breath and she,

                                          the smaller fervors now,

                                          a flash of secret, particulate power

                                          maybe mostly ether, mostly outside of pain

                                          now, as windows, clover, rain. Molecular, unseen,

                                          hidden in the green of the roses sharp with stars

                                          over our shoulders as we are 

                                          children, learning to whistle, and then,

                                          the children, they are mine, 

                                          made up of so much I cannot hear, 

                                          so much that does not speak to me. 

                                          Yet Voice. Of the shimmering procession of ants. 

                                          Of the palm leaves carried by schoolgirls. 

                                          Of the ocean material. 

                                          Of the stones nearby

                                          and the bed upon which a heart once 

                                          finished. Rest now, live one,

                                          the clouds are always changing shape. 

                                          Touch touch, live one.

                                          Everywhere is tear.

                                          “And learn to imitate

                                          her language there.”

“ON THE DEATH OF A YOUNG LADY OF FIVE YEARS OF AGE, a reinscription” by Aracelis Girmay from WHEATLEY AT 250 © 2023 Aracelis Girmay. Published by Pangyrus Inc. Used by permission of the poet.