I chose Matthew E. Henry to imitate because he talks about identity and the prejudices that come with that identity. I chose him because regardless of the fact that I cannot relate to his particular experiences, I can relate to the feelings they invoke. Regardless of the fact that all the poets we have been reading are incredible writers and all of their poems stir something in their readers, Henry’s poems are the ones that caused the most feelings and thoughts to surface, about his experiences but also about my own life. He is the one that made me remember and relive some of the most painful and frustrating moments in my life, and as much as it was uncomfortable, it felt special in the enormity of its effect.
foregone conclusion
how often did my having a vagina
deny me what I have worked so hard for?
made others forget, while looking at my chest
that there is also a head with a brain with thoughts
in the same body that has an arm on my waist.
a hand on my lower back in the office,
a sly smile and a wink in the morning meeting.
i never wanted to be a foregone conclusion.
Proverbs 22:6 - Matthew E Henry
In his poem Proverbs 22:6 Matthew Henry initiates a dialogue through his commentary on what society’s racism has cost him as a Black man, especially people’s condescensions in their immediate assumptions about him for nothing more than the color of his skin. He sparks the dialogue on how identities, whether chosen or not, regardless of a person’s individual abilities, intelligence, or personality as a whole, incite a significant difference in how other people treat you or attribute to you as a person. Because he gets discredited due to the color of his skin, his poem is short and concise; long enough to captivate the people giving him that single second of the benefit of the doubt, short enough to capture their attention in that split second, and powerful enough to live in their minds even after they turn their heads and their eyes shutter in dismissal. His poem is about being a Black man in society, while mine is about being a woman. This past summer I worked in sales, and my poem talks about my experience as being exactly that, a woman in sales, and not only that but one of the best salespeople in the office. Every time I would sell more than my male coworkers, rather than getting a “Congrats” on my achievements, I would get a “Wow, it’s so much easier to sell when you’re a woman,” completely disregarding the hours of work and harassment I endured from the old men, the young men, and the middle-aged men. The harassment I went through with my boss, when I was “his girl,” his “secret weapon;” all of these ‘compliments’ followed by a touch, a secret little smile, a wink, a look, a meeting in his office, as if I should feel special and grateful to have caught this 34 year-old man’s eye and interest. This particular poem, with its short but lasting punch, pulled on my heartstrings, on the deep, sometimes all-consuming frustration that these situations cause.
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not All men
we sat in the back of the class
as they talked about femicide,
the murder of women because they are women.
explained by a man, caused by a man, done by a man.
“Ni Una Menos,” he says. As if we don’t know the fear
of walking down the street,
of choosing our clothes in the morning,
of being a woman because I am a woman.
“not All men” he says. as if we should know the difference,
between the man in the street or the man in our bed,
only to wake up the next morning, with a broken heart and a broken neck.
because “not All men,” he said.
A meditation on the ship Desire
“Ni una menos” - Translation: Not one [woman] less
A mediation on the ship Desire, a poem by Matthew E. Henry, seems as though it is written about a lack of a childhood or a stolen one. As children, we have all, at one point in time, pretended to smoke in the cold with clouds of our breath, and no one would think anything of it because we were just kids being kids, and what did we know? But in that same cold breath, black children were shown D.A.R.E. slideshows while the same adults laughed at the little white children pulling the same joke. This poem paints the picture of a childhood cut short by the systemic racism permeating every aspect of society, with a school allowing the D.A.R.E. presenter to not only preach about the dangers of drugs with slideshows full of only people of color, but also the snide looks that the black children would get from those same adults that the white children would not receive, driving this point home with his last line “of the real war we were already fighting;” of having a racially-tailored explanation of their own existence presented to them by an uninformed and racist authority figure. My poem talks about a sexist-tailored explanation of the dangers of my own existence by a man, as well as the case of Sabrina Breuer in Paraguay. Sabrina Breuer was my mother’s cousin. She was brutally killed by her husband five years ago, and only this past December was the case closed in spite of the copious amounts of evidence pointing towards the occurred femicide. She was murdered by her own husband, the father of her child, the one man that she should be able to trust above all others, and even he failed her. “Not all men” is a phrase that men around the world love to use in defense of the patriarchal system they themselves have created and maintained in perpetuity. This phrase is used to excuse the behavior of so many men and simultaneously invalidate the ingrained fear and guardedness that women have towards men. “Not all men” allows men to place the blame on women, for being hurt or for being scared, allowing men to place the blame on women for their actions. The similarities between a white person explaining a black person’s experience and a man explaining a woman’s are placed next to each other in Henry’s poem and mine.
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a letter to the girl i was
i don’t even remember what I said. Something
that hurt and something that stung. I remember the tears.
theirs and mine and theirs caused by mine.
you weren’t happy and they weren’t a threat to you
and you learned, thank god you learned
that others’ pain does not cancel out your own.
i wish you’d seen that faster,
you’d stood up for yourself earlier and cried harder
didn’t bleed your pain out and asked for help.
help that wasn’t freely given but taken
with the force of the dysmorphia that still festers
the anxiety that still lingers and grips you
in its bony little hands, squeezing until you can’t breathe
until all you see is your skin sagging and
your bones crumbling to dust.
but here you are and here you stand
waiting for the apologies that will never come.
An open letter from the boy i was to the Man you have become
In the poem "an open letter from the boy i was to the Man you have become", Matthew E. Henry relates an incident in his youth where he, along with some of his white classmates, bullied another black kid in his school. He recalls the horror and the shame he still experiences over having been a part of that. This poem reminded me of when I used to be a bully in middle school, and the shame I still feel over it as well, but also the pain I was experiencing in my personal life that propelled me to be a mean person, rather than dealing with my own feelings. As much as I did not recall a specific incident or wrote it as a letter from me then to me now, I used the idea of writing a letter to an iteration of me. I wrote it from my point of view now, to that younger version of myself, the one that was hurt and hurting others as her response. This poem touches on the things I struggled with then and some of the things that I still struggle with now. Henry’s poem brought me back to a time in life where I was emotionally and psychologically low; a time that I am ashamed of and would rather forget, but he made me remember and he made me feel.
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