Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns
By: Andrea Gibson
When the Bough Breaks
It’s two a.m.
The emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard
with eyes paid to care
and asks me if I see people who “aren’t really there.”
I say, “I see people...
how the hell am I supposed to know
if they’re really there or not?”
He doesn’t laugh
Neither do I.
The math’s not on my side,
ten stitches and one lie, “I swear I wasn’t trying to die,
I just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the inside.”
Fast forward one year.
I’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone
reading a poem to four hundred latino high school kids
who live with the breath of the INS
crawling up their mothers’ backbones
and I am frantically hiding my scars,
‘cause the last thing I want these kids to know
is that I ever thought that my life was too hard.
I’ve never seen a bomb drop.
I’ve never felt hunger.
I’ve also never seen lightning strike
but we’ve all heard thunder
and it doesn’t take a genius to tell something’s burning.
The smoke rises between us,
forming walls so high
they split the sky like slit wrists
and then the stars fall like blood.
We’re all left with nothing, but a death wish.
He said, “call me by my true name
I am the child in Uganda all skin and bone”
Do you remember the rest?
And, “Jesus wept.”
Jesus wept, but look at our eyes
dry as the desert sand
dusting the edges of your soldier’s wedding bands.
Do you know children in Palestine fly kites
to prove that they are still free?
Can you imagine how that string
must feel between their fingers
as they kneel in the cinders of US-made missile heads?
You can count the dead by the colors in the sky.
The bough is breaking.
The cradle is falling.
Right now a six-year old girl is crouched in a ditch in Lebanon
wishing on falling bombs.
Right now our government is recording the test scores
of black and Latino 4th graders
to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2020.
Right now there’s a man on the street outside my door
with outstretched hands full of heart beats no one can hear.
He has cheeks like torn sheet music,
Every tear-broken crescendo falling on deaf ears.
At his side there’s a girl with eyes like an anthem
that no one stands up for.
Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there.
It’s that we ignore the ones who are.
Till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
walking into emergency rooms at two a.m.
flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain,
because we are bleeding from the outside in.
Our skin is not impervious.
Cultures built on greed and destruction
do not pick and choose who they kill.
Do we really believe our need for Prozac
has nothing to do with Fallujah,
with Kabul, with the Mexican border
with the thousands of US school kids
bleeding budget cuts that will never heal
to fuel war tanks?
Thank god for denial.
Thank god we can afford the makeup
to pile upon the face of it all.
Look at the pretty world.
Look at all the smiling people,
and the sky with a missile between her teeth
and a steeple through her heart
and not a single star left to hold her
And the voices of a thousand broken nations
saying “wake me, wake me
when the American dream is over.”
Analysis:
This poem's title is in reference to the nursery rhyme. This poem starts off with a mock on mental illness. Gibson a patient in a hospital is being asked ridiculous questions by a doctor. The people at the hospital think she attempted to kill herself.
The rest of the poem goes on to tell people about horrific things that are happening to people. She says "It doesn't take a genius to tell something is burning." This means no matter who you are you know what is going on. She goes over issues face by Lebanon, and Palestine because they are things that are happening and no one is doing anything about it. The line in response to the beginning that is really the purpose of this poem is, "Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren't there. /Its that we ignore the ones who are." This is my favorite line of the poem because she is saying how because of all the things we ignore it ate at her piece by piece until one day she found herself in a hospital at two am.
This poem has people feeling sympathy for the characters inside it. She then calls people and the country out when she thanks God for denial and the ability to cover it up. No one cares. She is trying to make the point because people need to care. They need to do something.
The closing stanza of this poem is very powerful. She blames the idea of the American Dream for what is happening. That people have lost sight of what it is specifically about. They started taking things that did not belong to them, and doing things that weren't right. She says a couple lines previous that "Cultures built on greed and destruction/do not pick and choose who they kill" We have no idea what we're causing because we can't truly control it.
This poem was meant to make you think. She said things most people are afraid to say. Maybe it is the activist in her, but something about this poem makes you want to get up and do something about it.