Poetry Corner
2 min read
All the Trees of the Field Shall Clap Their Hands
By Eduardo C. Corral
Josefa Segovia was tried, convicted & hanged on July 5, 1851, in Downieville, California, for killing an Anglo miner, a man who the day before had assaulted her.
Are the knees & elbows
the first knots
the dead untie?
I swing from a rope
lashed
to a beam. Some men
along the Yuba river
toss coins
into the doubling water.
Visible skin.
Memorable hair.
Imagine: coal, plow,
rust, century.
All layers
of the same palabra.
Once
I mistook a peach pit
on a white dish
for a thumbprint.
Wolf counselor.
Reaper.
Small rock.
The knot just under
my right ear
whispers God is gracious,
God will
increase. The soul,
like semen,
escapes
the body
swiftly.
Copyright © 2012 by Eduardo Corral. From Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s “The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database”.
About the poet: Eduardo C. Corral was born February 25, 1973, in Casa Grande, Arizona. He studied Chicano studies at Arizona State University, and received a Masters in Fine Arts from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Corral is the author of Guillotine (Graywolf Press, 2020) and Slow Lightning (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 2012), selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets. His honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a 92Y Discovery Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Holmes National Poetry Prize and the Hodder Fellowship, both from Princeton University. A CantoMundo fellow, Corral was the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in September 2019. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University and lives in North Carolina.