how can any language be ‘ugly’ if it’s always also the language passed along from a mother to her child, the language of two lovers in the dark, the language of stories told by grandfathers, the language of vows and eulogies, the language of learning and singing and feeling and connection and culture… how is all of that not inherently beautiful
Crow/Cree Lovers (@thunderbirdarts, 2021) // unknown // Armor (Jennifer Hom, 2011) // Nan Goldin // The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung, 1993) // Mumin Jangani and Hakima Athuai for Vogue Portugal (Jack Bridgland, June 2021) Adam Styka // Bob Peak for Cosmopolitan // Gabe and Greg (Landyn Pan, 2019) // Clifford Prince King
And two i did not receive permission to post: Lee Kyutae // Bejo Bejo, 2018
In the late summer of 2018, an orca whale named Tahlequah swam around the Pacific Ocean carrying the corpse of her dead calf under her fin. The calf had died a few hours after its birth. Tahlequah was first spotted attempting to push it toward the edge of the Pacific Ocean between the United States and Canada before deciding to just carry the calf with her, which she did for over two weeks. Observers and scientists called it a “tour of grief.” The length of mourning was—to that point—unprecedented. It was always a question of letting go. If the whale let her calf go, it would sink to the bottom of the ocean and become a memory.
Once, I had a conversation with a poet who also lost their mother. As we charted out our shared grief, the poet told me something they had learned from another poet. “Well, we have two mothers,” they began to tell me. “The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down.”
There is the putting down of the metaphorical corpse, and then there is the carrying of the physical, but the hesitation to part with both comes from a similar place. A mother who has lost a child carries with her not only the corpse of that child, but the potential for what that life could have been. I mourn both the actual body and the potential for the whole person it held. How much better my time in the world could have been spent with all of the once-living people I’ve loved, still here.
The drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of someone with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink.
— Hanif Abdurraqib, from “On Going Home as Performance,” in A Little Devil in America
I borrowed a book of poetry from the library last week and it was really nice, so I googled the author (a 50-year-old French woman) to see what else she had written, and discovered on her website that she owns horses and offers rides in the woods during which people read & discuss poetry, including ‘moonlight rides’ and themed rides centred around a particular poet or topic. Sometimes you get a glimpse into a softer world… in which someone makes a living writing and publishing poems and taking people on poetry-themed horse rides by moonlight. I was going to say “I hope she’s having a great day” but I’m sure she is.