The Deepest Peace by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Author:Zenju Earthlyn Manuel [Manuel, Zenju Earthlyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

poetic solitude—the poetic justice of Phillis Wheatley

Sitting in the dark, listening to the last bird song, Earth turns away from the sun. In the desert we are on the edge of the turn. There’s an inner knowing of peace that comes with entering a silence beyond quiet. Reaching into the unknown, the poetic quiet uncoils into solitude. Suddenly, I see a different kind of inner monastic life—one without the monastery. A profound witnessing of life that wants to be laid down in words as an offering to the altar of silence.

How could I not share the times when the sun bursts through the rain clouds and reveals my whole life? The action of writing through the chaos of the world engages the sun and the rain, which is to say poetry engages everything in life.

This evening, a new moon causes me to pause and read Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century poet. Of course she would present herself during a new moon that is begging me to write. Removed at the age of seven from West Africa, bought and sold, Phillis had to be a moon child. Under the moon, when others were asleep, her enslavement erupted into poetry. Her writing was her underground path to freedom. Her words the voice of the earth. Wheatley put ink to paper for solitude:

Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main

The pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain;

Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,

Exhales the incense of the blooming spring.

Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,

And through the air their mingled music floats.

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