Tameka Cage Conley
This poem began the day my aunt died. Yet she was more than my aunt; she was my second mother who co-parented me with her sister—my mother. I wrote the early draft to capture how I felt and put it on the page. I was frustrated that life was going on with the same expectations of me while I attempted to nurse a new hole–a rip. While I sought to understand how to live without one of my mothers, the world continued, and I wanted it to stop. My aunt is the first parent I’ve lost, and I wanted to capture the grief plainly. So, the first draft is unusually blunt; I say “unusually” because though I seek for my poems to be clear, I also want to make them rise in some way that demonstrates survival and hope. In this first draft, I was uninterested in any of that. I was hurting, and I wanted the poem to announce that. In the months since she’s passed, I’ve been fortunate to feel connected to my aunt through nature, my dreams, and the comfort of knowing what she’d say and how she’d say it in any number of circumstances. I wanted a poem that “voiced” her and captured how anchoring our relationship was when she was alive and how deep and different it has come since she’s departed. I wanted language to capture the idea that she’d passed the baton of living abundantly to me and to dazzle with more hope than I’d previously been able to muster. I read poetry that inspires me when I write new work. This time was no different, from Lucille Clifton to Rita Dove to Countee Cullen to Cornelius Eady. The final lines of the poem enable the edict of Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” to be realized as a blessing from my aunt’s supernatural, imagined voice. My aunt also loved the blues. One of her prized possessions is a photo of her with blues singer, Latimore. I wanted an ode to her love of the blues and to invoke the form to capture my ongoing grief and feeling of loss.
< DRAFT >
I am partially dreaming, always, of the next
elixir. Let’s call it dawn, the way it rounds
In my mouth like light or earth. Let us rename
the planet and call it, Mother. Next to the word “mother,”
Let’s add the word, “aunt,” so it reads: mother-aunt,
which has never existed precisely
like this in language, but is how I was afforded to live
for 48 years of my life. A woman who did not birth me
was as much my mother as the one who did
and what I want, I cannot have: her back alive
or something to numb the pain forever,
which is how long I will be without her for
as long as I live,
and I want an abyss to echo her name for all time.
Instead, there are these lines.
And work every day.
< final version >
She Sends a Cardinal to Greet Me Every Day, I Promise You
(for Marilyn Denise Williams Jack, 1959-2026)
