Forgiveness as the Last Compassion

Abstract

Forgiveness as the Last Compassion Halee Kirkwood (bio) Halee Kirkwood, poem, Christ of the Abyss, Mediterranean Sea, shipwreck After Christ of the Abyss, a submerged statue by Guido Galletti, off the coast of San Fruttuoso in the Mediterranean Sea Across the sea, a sculptor plunges his bronze Christ down a forgiveness weighed heavy with barnacle, tempts me with the mercy of a place that didn't already know you— where crying is no longer spectacle but simply another warm current across the molten wound of love. In the left-behind of my people's sacred geology, zebra mussels scathe engines and drag ships [End Page 57] toward rocky bottoms, taconite uneasy in the ballast—trapped gas in the gut of industry. For a fee, I could dive toward my favorite Great Lakes shipwreck, witness the salvage of a vessel whose seams opened too quick, swallowed too much water, green and even as our conversation before your inevitable disaster, but it doesn't take a tour guide, fancy goggles, a historic plaque, a sonar image or [End Page 58] breathing machine to tell me this— in the years after my father's overdose several of the factories he worked at caught fire or exploded and left behind no charred skeleton, only a lace of grief to silver our lungs heavy hung in the air, the gray of history sunk into my body by my mother's cracked fingers stroking my hair, trodden sea grass tangled in the mess of it all, and all that's sailed across. [End Page 59] Halee Kirkwood HALEE KIRKWOOD is a recipient of Poetry Northwest's 2022 James Welch Prize for Indigenous poets. Their work has been published in Poetry, Under a Warm Green Linden, Poem-a-Day, and more. They were an inaugural In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets) Fellow and are a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwe. Copyright © 2022 University of North Carolina Wilmington