“Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name.”
The subject of this poem is history's erasure of the names of contributions made by Black women. This concept is made visceral through the metaphorical comparison of stolen crops. To steal crops is to steal food and to steal food is to steal the sustenance necessary for life. The idea being proposed is the connection between food and identity as necessities for existence. The erasure of the names of those who contributed to progress but received no recognition is the theft of their very identity.
“History is a ship forever setting sail.”
When it comes to names erased and identities stolen from the march of time, history is, fortunately, not a written account carved into stone. It is one of the great paradoxes of the discipline that history can be rewritten. History, it must be remembered, is not defined as the irrefutable facts of events that happened in the past, but rather as the written record of those events. This is the idea at work in this metaphor. The idea that history is also in the process of setting sail means that it never completely leaves the harbor. Problems can be fixed before dooming the ship to sink. The message the speaker seems to get across is that it might not be too late to fix history flawed by the erasure of the names of contributors, Significant events in the past produce evidence as well as history and witnesses to the truth as well as biographers of the untruth.
Our name
Is blown from tree to tree, scattered by the breeze. Who am I to say what,
In that marriage, is lost? For all I know, the grass has caught our name.
The poem is comprised of seven stanzas in which each stanza is a couplet. The second line of all seven stanzas all end with the word “name.” In all but one of those cases, the name is not just the last word of the line, but the final word of a sentence. The fourth stanza is the only exception. In this case, the second line of the couplet features one complete sentence before beginning another with the words “Our name” which, as evidenced upon, is completed in the opening line of the succeeding couple. The sudden departure from form represented here becomes an example of form matching content. The content expresses the concept that the names erased by history have not been forgotten. Somewhere out there is a memory of the truth rather than the written history that passes from one person to another like floating through the air on a current. The structural change so that this repetition of the word “name” is not an endpoint marked by a period or question mark lends it a sense of freedom that allows the context to be passed to the next stanza and it stands alone in possessing the quality. This utilization of form-matching content comes to a perfect close with the resumption of the second line ending a sentence with the phrase “caught on the name” as an indicator that nothing sails weightlessly on an air current forever.
