I Call, You Respond

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

Call and Response: “Ballad”

Sonia Sanchez is one of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement and is the author of 16 books. She’s the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. The lyric poem “Ballad” is from Sanchez’s book, Homegirls & Handgrenades.

Ballad
(after the spanish)

forgive me if i laugh
you are so sure of love
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.

the rain exploding
in the air is love
the grass excreting her
green wax is love
and stones remembering
past steps is love,
but you. you are too young
for love
and i too old.

once. what does it matter
when or who, i knew
of love.
i fixed my body
under his and went
to sleep in love
all trace of me
was wiped away

forgive me if i smile
young heiress of a naked dream
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.

 RESPONSE #3: by Jennifer Seay

In college, the study of poetry was a stumbling block for me; I was always taught there must be a deeper meaning. As I read “Ballad” by Sonia Sanchez it evoked a definite image of an older, wiser woman speaking to a much less experienced young woman. I started with that image and decided to see where the words took me from there:

Gram never talked about her life before Grandpa until I was sitting with her on the top step of her weathered front porch. But there, in the waning evening light, she told me about her first true love. The first man who respected her. The first man who saw something other than a woman to be controlled standing before him. She asked me if that’s what my “beau” (her word, not mine) saw when he looked at me.

I hesitated. I wanted to say, “Yes.” I wanted to be able to reassure her that I knew what I was doing. I wanted to be able to visit her without lying about the cuts and bruises.

“I won’t find love again,” she said as the far away the horizon carved darkly into the orange sky. She turned my face so she could look into my eyes, blue to blue.

“And you are too young to have found it.”

***

Jennifer Seay spent 20 years kicking electronics into submission before fiction finally jumped out of the shadows and dragged her away.