‘Stillborn Godhead’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Sometimes, basic symbols of nature and humanity must be stand-ins for great violence. At least, that’s how I feel after reading syan jay’s poem, ‘Stillborn Godhead,’ in Third Point Press. Ostensibly a small, magical story about clouds and rain, it is nonetheless a story about survival: My mother gave me her knife, / she has taught me that hope is vicious,” they write, and the poem goes on to detail how the speaker must exsanguinate a cloud for their family to continue living. Imagery of childbirth and weather has been necessarily mutated into a language of survival, set within a circular narrative that approaches the precipice of hopelessness. How does language bleed like this? How do we form these poems that are both the blade of the knife and the handle? I don’t know, but poems like this are continued evidence of poetry’s mysterious and transformational power.