Poem of the Week | February 20, 2023

This week’s Poem of the Week is “Threat is Not Always an Omen” by Grace MacNair.

Grace MacNair is a poet, teacher, and healthcare professional. Born and raised in North Carolina, she currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and holds an MFA from Hunter College. Grace has received residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Ragdale, Marble House, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, Bethany Arts, and the Carolyn Moore Writers House. Grace was selected by Yona Harvey as the winner of Radar Poetry’s 2021 Coniston Prize and by Safia Elhillo as the winner of Palette Poetry’s 2022 Emerging Poet Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Poetry Northwest, Frontier Poetry, Best New Poets 2022, and elsewhere. Grace’s micro-chapbook, Even As They Curse Us, is available from Bull City Press.

Threat is Not Always an Omen

              for GMS

Yesterday I floated in an ocean
as clear
                as winter light.

Floated until I forgot I
was floating.
                Floated until I couldn’t

differentiate
between the waves
                & the blood pounding in my ears.

Far below me,
hundreds of feet
                below me,

jagged rocks expanded,
an entire mountain range
                submerged.

Transparent as air
& blood-temperature,
                maybe the water

was an illusion & I’d fall
through it
                like I had through love

when I’d believed I couldn’t
love a man unless
                he’d truly suffered.

The truth is I couldn’t love a man
unless he’d made me suffer.
                The reasons were the usual—

but what changed
can only be described
                by describing something else.

Like how yesterday
I kept floating
                until the rocks began

to beautify themselves.
Kept floating until
                I became

clear & continuous
as the water suspending me
                above the rocks.

Seagrass swayed black
against the blue.
                Shoals of silver fish contracted

& expanded like smoke.
Coral breathed. Water bent
                the sun around me

until the moon unrolled
a shoulder-wide lane of gamboge shine
                over the dark waves.

“See,”
I heard my beloved say,
                “Threat’s not always an omen.”

Author’s Note

One of the things I admire most about my partner is his belief that love, and by extension life, can be radically safe, and even restful. For years, I’ve tended to believe the opposite, but I felt something shift after I wrote this poem, my first true love poem, last October in Greece. I was staying by myself in a stone house surrounded by olive groves with a view of the sea, where I’d swim after long hikes spent listening to Emily Wilson’s brilliant translation of the Odyssey. A few days earlier, I’d attended my friend Athina’s triumphant, five-day home birth in Athens. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, maybe it was the hours I’d spent listening to the Odyssey, but I couldn’t stop thinking about violence. The violence of childhood that normalizes unsafe futures. The violence Athina avoided by giving birth at home. Odysseus glamorizes the violence of patriarchy, racism, capitalism, and settler colonialism, even as he pre-dates the terms/concepts. He thrives on deceit, self pity, murder, rage, blame, hypocrisy, ransacking, short-sightness, mismanagement—and so many other harms our culture parades under abstract banners of freedom, love, hope, and honor. Despite the beauty of my surroundings, these thoughts weighed on me until one evening, after floating in the ocean as the poem describes, I heard my partner’s voice in my head and inchoately felt that the dailyness of love, the beauty of the world, is not abstract, cannot be abstract—and even as our society accelerates towards harm, love can accrue, putting distance between, and even transforming my relationship to, myself and what has hurt me.