Eileen Cleary
Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV.
The earth tests each person,
like the Great Famine tested a woman
who inevitably succumbed. A man
later carved her image, having no camera,
into wood. I watch her story on a T.V.
that channels crowds of gasping people. No words
escape their chiseled throats. No words.
No proper nouns. No names to tell which person
might be the effigy on my T.V.,
and no markers to signal where this woman’s
bones might be. More femurs as the camera
pans a field to an ancient farmer, a man
who fled Ireland for America. In his diaspora, this man’s
tears, or mine, blur the screen. Picture, his words
beg, the pits they threw their bodies in. His inner camera
mutely records as each new person
perishes in a fresh death toll, conjuring this woman
as whole villages sicken and die on T.V.
Stockpiles of grain to fatten the cattle, the T.V.
anchor adds, for export. The old man
flinches. Fish just offshore. This woman
wasn’t felled by potato fungus but by words.
He explains, The contagion of each person
who spread them. The camera
in the man pings. So sensitive. His camera
sharpens through the T.V.
events we now witness in person,
a terrible gathering in the gut. The old man
scowls: Let this thin the herd were the words
the leaders levied against this woman.
The newly dead, like this woman,
carry their invisible lives away from the camera,
the wider orb never turning to their words:
I was here. Leaders stream on T.V.
rarely naming each person
as distinct and meaning it. One such man
was elected after boasting to every person who’d listen
on camera or T.V., about savaging a woman.
After aping a disabled man. I can barely speak these words.
—Submitted on 08/17/2020
Eileen Cleary is the author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019) and 2 A.M. With Keats (forthcoming from Nixes Mate, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, West Texas Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Solstice, Mom Egg Review, and other journals. Cleary founded the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books, and curates the Lily Poetry Salon.
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