for Zora Neale Hurston
Florida
Joshua BennettFor our purposes, we begin with the eternal
feminine and its string of beads, end with you
as a girl in Eatonville, days before you board
a boat to cross the river, leapfrogging the invisible
partition that separates your hometown
from Jacksonville and its caverns full of cash;
the haywire soundscape you once adored,
and a private school scholarship to supercharge
your future. The tenor of the underlying metaphor
becomes clear only once I am older, preparing
to teach your essay to a classroom full of engineers,
their palms pressed directly to the pulse of whatever
our species is soon to become. Your journey was a map
of the modern mind’s uncountable transformations:
traversing the water from home, a place named
for the man who helped your ancestors set its silver-gray
foundations, to the big city bearing a sigil of wholesale
slaughter, thousands destroyed in the name of a nation’s
blood-drenched invention. Cosmic Zora, we call to you now
from across the flecked darkness, arms filled with pages
blank as bone, searching for the words we need
but cannot hold and remain as we are.
describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem.
I suppose the decision to keep the word “cash,” in the third couplet, which always felt like the organic choice in that spot, though it wasn’t clear to me at first whether it would work in concert with the rest of the poem’s pitch (we open with the eternal, for example, and then end with the interstellar scale of the last stanza). So I think I might have swapped it out, or else considered doing so, in the first few drafts. It’s a word that I heard so much in the music growing up (Cash Money Records, Cash Rules Everything Around Me, et al.) and thought about fairly often anyhow because it was such a contentious topic in my earliest environments. Who had cash and who didn’t. And why. Family members who loved you and would buy you food on department store credit cards they couldn’t quite afford. Tithing as a spiritual practice. Those extra few dollars at the bodega which were the difference between a plain buttered roll and a breakfast sandwich that could change the whole tenor of the morning.
So I chose to let it stay. Because again, this is the sort of the dance I’ve been engaged in while working on this newest collection: allowing the lines to run a bit wild at times, really singing when I want to, doing my best to let the mysticism in.
Joshua Bennett is Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and Professor of Literature at MIT. He is the author of five books, including Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2023. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.
Originally published:
October 16, 2024