Poem of the Week | December 04, 2012

This week we’re going to let Kwame Dawes raise the hymn with a new poem. A Ghanaian-born Jamaican, Dawes is the award-winning author of sixteen books of poetry (most recently, Wheels, 2011) and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He also teaches in the Pacific MFA Writing program.  Dawes’ book, Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems will be published by Copper Canyon in 2013.

Hear Stop Time.
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Author’s Note:

African-based syncopations in music tend to seduce us and enliven us with the illusion and reality of how rhythm can be manipulated. Stop Time, like the seeming off-kilter of reggae’s rhythm, for instance, or the irresistible “pockets” in dancehall rhythms and the clave patterns of the rumba, is often the basis of the swoop and sway of the dances that it creates. I have been fascinated by the way in which stop time is a beautiful and persistent piece of luggage Africans have carried with us even without knowing it is there, and in the poem the church becomes the place where it finds sacred power—a metaphysical moment of helplessness that relies on faith—the gap, the absence, the separation—before the bridge of faith that spans the gap and brings us safely home.

Stop Time

 

Stop time: There is a grunt in the gap.
Stop time: There is a head nod in the gap.
Stop time: There is a hallelujah in the gap.
Stop time: There is a shudder in the gap.
Stop time: There is a well in the gap.
Stop time: There is a hiccup in the gap.
Stop time: Got a foot shuffle in the gap.
Stop time: There is a bright light in the gap.
Stop time: There is a breath in the gap.

 

In the congregation, the rigid law
of time is shattered by that sudden
stop; that breaking of all order,
making someone stumble if they
don’t know the path; making a body
wonder at the space left, the emptiness;
sudden so, sudden so, sudden so.
In the congregation, in that moment
when the handclaps and showering,
the crowded in room, and the sweat
eats away at the talc; a body
finds itself in the gap, and this
dance that lifts a big clumsy
man to his feet makes him
turn, makes him jump, makes
him holler, everything, louder
and louder, everything! And here
in this chapel the world is held
in the cradle of a song, and for this
one moment, he knows how to walk,
how to ride through the world, how stop
time is the music of our resistance
and the song is the healing of all pain.

 

Stop time: There is a Praise God in the gap.
Stop time: There is a hmmmm in the gap.
Stop time: There is a Jesus in the gap.
Stop time: There is a Yes suh in the gap.
Stop time: There is a hmmmm in the gap.

 

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