How to Turn a Hate March into a Jubilee Procession
Dana Henry Martin
after George Sherwood Hunter
Remove torches.
Add paper lanterns.
Remove logo T-shirts and jeans.
Add white Victorian dresses.
Add leather shoes with buttons
and tucked heels.
Add bonnets
and bonnets and more bonnets.
Remove pavers, grass, black sky.
Add cobble. Add a single-mast
ship with no sail in the distance,
other ships farther, their masts
crisscrossed like toothpicks.
Add water that looks painted
and crackled.
Add celadon sky
that can’t be teased from water
nor water teased from it.
Remove screams and teeth
and tonsils exposed to air.
Add children and four men,
one in a costume, one leaning
over a railing, one in a floppy hat,
one holding a basket full of sticks.
Remove stiff arms raised in
Sieg Heil salutes.
Add gloved hands
that clutch lantern poles, free arms
hanging or perched like birds on a hip.
Remove city.
Add village.
Remove hate masked as march.
Add jubilee parading as jubilee.
Remove anger looking for anchor.
Add far-reaching gaze like a woman
looking out over the wheat she’s grown
in a place where nothing should grow.
Add soft glow on cheeks.
Add pointed toes.
"How to Turn a Hate March into a Jubilee Procession" was first published in Sheila-Na-Gig. The question at the heart of this poem is how do we break through the vitriol many feel today and the hate speech and hate symbols associated with that vitriol? I saw Sherwood Hunter's Jubilee Procession in a Cornish Village, June 1897 one morning on social media. I was struck by the way elements of it both paralleled and stood in stark contrast to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. The breakthrough for me was being able to transmute the march into a jubilee.
DANA HENRY MARTIN is a poet, medical writer, and health- and mental-health advocate whose chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2012), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2012), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). Martin's work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Laurel Review, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. She weaves, birds, and hangs out with the cows who live next to the cemetery in Toquerville, Utah. danahenrymartin.com