John Sibley Williams
Like many of my poems, “act of contrition” is a weaving of various external inspirations and deeply personal themes. Flipping through an extensive Edward Hopper book, I began taking notes on the incompletenesses and absences in the images. I found great truths in the lack of concrete truths within them. From there, I laced elements of history (both cultural and familial) and asked myself how my own older, white family would have felt about my wife’s Japanese ancestry, especially her grandmother who was raised in wartime internment camps. In doing so, I hoped to spark a conversation about how privilege is handed down and how we can still construct bridges over the many arid riverbeds of our country’s ugly cultural histories.
act of contrition
when the winds shift / the dying
drifts west / over unfinished tracks
hills without names / bodies without
names / tangles of / ill-fitting histories
all the wildness / just outside Hopper’s
gorgeously whitesacaped worlds of /
lighthouse & café & sunlit / american
detachment / my great-grandfather &
what he’d do if he ever met my wife’s
/ walled up in one after another / intern-
ment camp / his language a wick / a ritual
/ vigil / the unsettlement of birds he sketched
on scraps from a distant / memory of sky /
how destiny manifests differently for some /
how when i rub both photos together / now / the same
spark / same burn / same collapsed bridge trying
so damn hard to span / the same river my children
wash themselves in / in rawer times i’d unbreak
this bread / rifle through these glossy images
of loss / of birdlessness / & burn barrel it all
night / until the night too felt / exorcised / free
to hurt / & be hurt / but the wind tonight / hurts
us just right / the hills are not bodies / & everything
has a name / a language / two shores & a river
we bridgelessly feel our way across / toward yes
John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize).). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A twenty-seven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.