ISSUE: Summer 2022
Sometimes, a teacher proposes
we write about something
insignificant, or a friend requests
that poems and posts not get so
political. Imagine something ordinary,
something simple
and free: a white shirt
clipped on a clothesline and
fluttering in the breeze. But I can’t
slip it on with ease
as some might,
though I might long, at times,
for a respite. I try to imagine
how quiet it must be, caught
in a cloth so white
it seems to possess
no color at all, only the pure
bright essence of light
and reality. And unlike snakes
why would we molt
from a skin we can’t perceive?
In the ordinary
moments of my day,
I try not to see
in the length of ironed linen
a turban torn from a grandfather’s head
moments before he’s thrown down
on a suburban street, palm trees
waving quietly. Or a burka ripped
from a woman’s head
as she’s shoved like a pinball
from fist to fist on a crowded train
among men who want to rise and reclaim.
Or a towel that wraps a baby
born at the border, who is greeted
by barbed wire and searchlights
probing shadows like a white knife.
As much as I try, I cannot write
of white shirts
without likening them first
to the hood of a Klansman
afire in a darkening wood.
I can’t think of it (cloth starched,
pressed cleanly into folds,
steam rising from hemmed edges)
without envisioning heat
vanishing from beneath a shroud
on cement, from the dark skin of a boy
allowed to be dead for hours
on a public street, his soul restless
and lingering above him,
his shirt a beacon of light
I cannot turn from, so
searing its clarity.
From the shirt, a white shirt,
I can’t unlink the chain of police
who stood shoulder to shoulder
holding sheets to block the view
as though not even the sun
could judge who or what
had seemed to keep their peace
while the boy’s life unspooled
a ribbon of red
downhill. I try to grasp
that in some cultures, white
is a symbol of purity; in others,
an expression of grief.
