Fury by Tina Chang

February 18, 2015   Fury   Tina Chang

My son rubs his skin and names it brown, his expression gleeful as I rub a damp cloth over his face this morning. Last night, there were reports that panthers were charging through the streets. I watched from my seat in front of the television, a safe vista. I see the savannah. Sometimes, though, my son wakes to a kind of nightmare. He envisions words on the wall and cannot shake them. He tries to scratch them away or runs out of the room but the words follow him. None of it makes any sense but it’s the ghost of his fear that I fear. What is a safe distance from the thoughts that pursue us and what if the threat persists despite our howling? Buildings collapse, a woman falls down the stairs and lands on her back with only one eye open, half awake to her living damage. I think my son senses what is happening on the street, his heart fiercely tethered to mine. I know the world will find him and tell him the history of his skin. Harm will come searching for him and pour into him its scorching mercury, its nails, its bitter breath against his boyhood skin still smelling of milk and wonder. Somewhere, the panthers are running starting fires fueled by a distinct hunger. Somewhere there is a larger fire, a pyre stoked by the fury of all that we have come to understand, all that we could have done but did not. Its flames lick the underside of the earth. It propagates needing only a frenzy of air to fan it to inferno. I’ll call that the Forest. The deep woods are ahead and if the panthers could just reach it. If I told you that all of this happens at night, you wouldn’t believe me. If I told you all of this happens in the future, always the Future you would continue following the scent you could only describe as smoke. I’ll call that Justice. But aren’t we talking about mercy and its dark twin? Isn’t that what is pummeling history in the side as I write this? Isn’t it the thorn and the taser? Isn’t it the chokehold and the gold arm of vengeance? I say it from my mouth and when it spills forth it lands on the ground in a pool of light reflecting back at me the one true blasphemy: Love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love is crowding the street and needs only air and it lives, over there, in the distance burning.            Copyright © 2015 by Tina Chang. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Fury was the first emotion I felt when I read of the grand jury verdict regarding the Eric Garner case following on the heels of the Michael Brown case. At the same time, my five-year-old son was studying himself for a series of school self-portraits where he was asked to identify his physical characteristics. In each portrait his skin is brown and it is clear he loves himself without question.” —Tina Chang   Tina Chang’s most recent book is Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011). She is the poet laureate of Brooklyn, teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and is an international faculty member at the University of Hong Kong. Most Recent Book by Chang   Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011) "Poem from the Russian" by Jean Valentine "In Our Late Empire, Love" by Malachi Black "from Citizen, I" by Claudia Rankine Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.