Song to be Sung before Dying
by Ellen Bass
Break me like bread. Take me
apart. Strip each rib down to light.
Pour me out like a bucket of milk, sloshing
hot from the teats of a goat. Shear
my hair and toss it onto the back
of the wind for the birds to weave. Like the egret
pecks at the elephant’s hide,
like the plover scrapes the crocodile’s teeth,
pick me clean. Whisper
to my lonely breasts. Tell them a story,
you are going to die. But don’t let me go
until my body is a wilderness. Burrow
like mites head-down into my lashes.
You be the whale. I am the krill.
Open your jaws and swim through my shoal.
Strip me down to my foundation.
Handle each plank and rusty nail. Erect me
again in a new location. I’ve always wanted
a view of the sea. Unload me
like a cargo ship. Hoist
cases of whiskey and all the flaming
threads of saffron. Don’t be patient.
Plunge your hand through my flesh
like a Tibetan healer and pull out the nest
of hair and teeth. Give me
eighteen sinuous arms like Avalokiteshvara
so I can hold you through every terror.
Give me infinite legs like the Nude Descending
so I can be always rushing toward you.
Excavate me with your chisels. Crack me
and free the mirrored fossil
waiting for you these fifty million years.
Ellen Bass's most recent book is Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). She co-edited the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women and her non-fiction books include The Courage to Heal and Free Your Mind. Her poetry frequently appears in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, three Pushcart Prizes, and The Lambda Literary Award. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. This poem originally appeared in Narrative.
"Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" is the second annual offering of the Poetry Coalition — more than twenty organizations nationwide dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. A founder member of the Coalition, Letras Latinas at Notre Dame's Institute's for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present 10 poems by women in March that engage with this year's theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith's "Flores Woman." The poems in this project were curated by Emma Trelles.