JFSR Welcomes New Poetry Editor Constance Merritt

The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion is excited to announce its new poetry editor, Constance Merritt. Welcome, Constance!

Merritt is an award-winning American poet and a self-described “…reader, art maker, music lover, social justicer, inveterate learner, job seeker, [and] freckle face.” Merritt has four published volumes of poetry: Blind Girl Grunt: The Selected Blues Lyrics and Other Poems (2017); Two Rooms (2009); Blessings and Inclemencies (2007); and A Protocol for Touch (2000), which won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Her other awards and honors include the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation Award; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University Fellowship; the Cave Canem Fellow; and the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence. Her work has also been featured in Poetry, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, The New Yorker, and others.

Please enjoy a selection of her poetry: from Blind Girl Grunt, “Meditation on a Theme Suggested by Dr. Trellou Joseph Pond,” and an unpublished poem entitled “Incantation.”

Meditation on a Theme Suggested by
Dr. Trellou Joseph Pond

How would it feel to really love your neighbor,
your neighbor who worships a stranger god?
What if your god allowed that man to prosper—

no plagues, no holy wars, no sanctioned slaughter
of first born sons? Could such a god be God?
How would it feel to really love your neighbor?

Will the salt of holiness have lost its savor
when no longer underwritten by the blood
of lambs, infidels, martyrs? If we prosper,

if we be long upon this earth brother
to brother, is God then obsolete? Or would
God dwell among us—familiar, stranger: neighbor?

Between our fallings-short and strivings-for
yawned an abyss so fell we needed God,
a cobbled ladder in order to cohere, let alone to prosper.

But if they were always us the terrible strangers—
attending angels, wrathful, jealous gods?
How would it feel to really love your neighbor?
To love your self? To reverence life? To prosper?

 

Incantation

I bes adamant;
I bes hard-headed, whole-hearted, a clarion compass, a coalmine       canary;
I bes mountains.
I bes lapis lazuli, rainbow obsidian, coal; danger, desire, failure, fracture, flame.
I bes unapologetic, unashamed.
I bes stolen peoples, their forbidden tongues, their forgotten names.
I bes beloved of Addie and Cleo, Rosie and Saphronia.
I bes blood and sweat, bullets and blues.
I bes cotton and pulpwood, sawmills and laundry, furniture stores and pharmacies, bicycles and lawnmowers, baled cardboard, burial insurance, aluminum cans and scrap metal.
I bes Ishmael, the woman at the well, a straight arrow shot from history’s bow;
I bes Malcolm’s means, Jesse’s rainbow, Martin’s beloved community.
So let me be.
Let me belong here.
Let me and mine be whole, be human, be free.
Free from the white man’s chains—
his demons, his burdens, his charitable gifts;
his stunted identity and twisted desires;
his “law and order,” his hems and haws, his hindering help;
the whip, the hanging tree, the peace officer’s Glock.
Let us be.
Let us breathe.
Let us live.
Let us grieve.
Let us forgive or hold a mountain of a grudge.
Let us trudge on; let us survive;
Let us abide until we move mountains,
Until we thrive.