On Floating
By Niall Twohig
I.
Do you know how to float?
If not, study the jellyfish:
emptiness
allows it to fill
easy undulations
allow it to flow
This is the way to float –
empty, with ease
How did you learn to float?
Your mother’s hands under your back
one day, you relaxed enough
for her to slip away without you knowing
It was as if her hands were still there
This is the way to float –
relax into loving hands
What makes it hard to float?
Disoriented by water’s mechanics,
our body forgets its fluidity,
forgets its watery beginnings.
It remembers only:
falling into the deep end.
getting tossed by a wave.
not finding ground.
going under.
water filling lungs.
blacking out.
Every cell
seizes, freezes,
stresses, strains
against the flow.
We become a stone.
Gravity has us.
II.
We’re drowning on land too.
I see it in your face.
you see it in mine.
I hear it in your breath
and feel it in mine.
Disoriented by society’s mechanics,
tugged and torn by machinery,
bombarded by digital waves,
tossed by crises,
numbed by headlines—
Our body forgets its fluidity.
It remembers only its falls,
pain of going under,
no ground beneath its feet.
This body
thrashes and lashes out,
seizes and freezes
into stone.
Gravity has it.
Forces it down,
to bend (like my Da),
to fracture (like my Ma),
to implode (like my half-brother)
Short of breath,
full of fear,
we labor
against gravity
against each other
scrambling
pushing and pulling,
gnashing and rending,
to get higher
to grab ahold of
hard-to-reach things.
Things that will,
we’re told,
allow us to rise,
to breathe freely,
to live fully.
In my life
In my folk’s lives
In their folk’s lives
those things proved to be lures
and dead weight.
III.
We can float here too.
You’ll see.
Sit quietly.
Scan the body.
Notice any rigidity
Notice where you’ve become stone
Now,
remember your fluidity,
your watery beginnings.
Be like the jellyfish,
empty, at ease.
Be like the child,
buoyed by invisible hands.
Try it.
Really try it.
Some days, you’ll float.
You’ll feel it.
What’s lifting you is Grace,
more potent than gravity,
more powerful than any force of man.
Grace lifts you on an ocean of Love,
Its waters fill you,
Its current flows through you,
word and deed flow with ease.
Ride that current
to the work you need do,
the communities you need buoy.
IV.
Think of the dusty woman.
See her face,
drowning.
Think of the Triangle Factory workers.
forced to sew at inhuman speeds,
forced to fall.
See their faces,
drowning.
Think of underpaid TAs,
burnt out gig workers, hustlers,
rat racers, and passionless students.
See their faces,
drowning.
Think of farmworkers
forced to bend
with short-handled hoe
See their faces,
drowning.
Think of a poor baby
forced to bed,
cold and hungry.
See its face,
Its parents’ faces,
drowning.
Think of the girl in the photo
liquid fire seeping through her skin.
See her face,
drowning.
Think of those who profit off such misery.
(I had separate stanzas for these folk but one is enough)
See their faces,
drowning as they force others under.
See Emmett Till’s face,
drowned by hate.
See his killers’ faces,
drowned in hate.
Think of Southern children smiling beneath dangling feet.
Think of Northern children smiling under Swastika signs.
Think of this woman frozen in scream.
See their faces and hearts
turned to stone.
Now
See Dr. King’s face
See the faces
of those who stepped onto the Mississippi bound bus,
who raised flowers against guns
who refused to be bled dry for our grapes.
See their Face
so buoyant, so light.
Neither gravity, nor any force of man,
can crush what flows through It.
Seeing that Face is enough to make you float.