I Call, You Respond

A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

Call and Response: “The Lamb”

CALL:

Poet Linda Gregg, who has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of California-Berkeley and Princeton University, writes lyrical poems that speak to grief, seeking and desire with absolute attention to craft. Poet W.S. Merwin has said about Gregg’s work: “I have loved Linda Gregg’s poems since I first read them. They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance.” “The Lamb,” from Gregg’s Chosen By the Lion is very much a doorway for a reader: to doom, salvation or some limbo in between?

The Lamb

It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’s fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.

 RESPONSE #3: by Amy Loder

“The Lamb” is about survival and the inability of destruction to eradicate all beauty and signs of life. The same can be said for the life of the late Maya Angelou, as a survivor of childhood abuses, who still remained standing amid damage while moving forward in growth. My response to “The Lamb” is tiny excerpts pulled from Angelou’s “Still I Rise” and a photo:

You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

***

Amy Loder is a fine artist and art-lover of all creative media. She lives in Vineland, NJ, practicing social work –striving to embrace the joys and ease the pains of humanity.