Seizure

By Lynn Emanuel b. 1949 Lynn Emanuel

This was the winter mother told time by my heart

ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.

This was the fifties & we were living on nothing

& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,

what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart

of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists

& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,

what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her

own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed

with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman,

into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming

& brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,”

& hissed my little princess & hushed the Jordan & set the chariots

on the golden streets & Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.

Source: The Dig (University of Illinois Press, 1992)

Biography

Lynn Emanuel is the author of several volumes of poetry. She sees her Hotel Fiesta (1984), The Dig (1992), and Then, Suddenly— (1999) as a triptych exploring the convention and flexibility of the book, and the agency of readers and writers. As poet Eavan Boland notes, “Lynn Emanuel’s poems have a rare power: they connect to the world through estrangement.”

The Dig received the National Poetry Series Award. Emanuel’s work has . . .

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