(Roots)

Abstract

(Roots) Daniel Tobin (bio) From the forthcoming book-length poem, This Broken Symmetry, on the life and witness of Simone Weil. He is waiting at the door of "Miss Simone," curled thereAs though in utero—the boy she tutors, his new wordsCopied daily in a notebook, his future's hampered code. She likes her room at the top of the cottage, stars at night,The branches full of birds, having been denied her wishTo be smuggled into France, air dropped, to die a sacrifice, Not withering away in the Ministry Offices editing tracts,Composing her Need for Roots, DeGaulle thinking her mad,And in her notebook her last texts: "As in Christ's parable, I am that fig tree, barren." Or any stone on which seed falls,Never to be fleshed. But to partake of the Communion,The sacrament an image, perfect, of the universe entire, The meal that she denies herself, unlike those few eveningsHere in Notting Hill, before the nightly migraines wake her—Her landlady's warm offerings of coffee and buttered bread. Not long now until the sanitarium in Ashford, her lungsWasting, she refusing food to ally her soul with the starvingAt home, the world uprooted, herself the frailest cutting From the Hidden: "God is not in time. We are abandoned.But only from the past, absolutely beyond our reach, real,Only from the past alone will renewal come, if we love it." Let it be Villanueva, ten years before, at seaside. She livesIn her bathing suit, not dressing for meals, her rags dropped,Her skin wet. And a fisherman threads a flower in her hair. [End Page 153] Daniel Tobin Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and the newly published Blood Labors. Tobin is also editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present; Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge; Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (with Pimone Triplett); and, To The Many: Collected Early Poems of Lola Ridge. He has won, among other prizes, The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston. daniel_tobin@emerson.edu. Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press