By Michael Tyler, EJS Poet-in-Residence
We will never breath the rarest air
From the peaks of highest virtue,
Nor gaze into the starriest night
At the glow of brightest dreams;
Nor look up at the bluest skies
And the heavenliest intentions,
To see the sun arise to shine
A most amazing grace…
We will never sail the broadest seas
To chart the greatest truths,
Nor drink the purest water
From crystal lakes of pristine pride;
Nor fish from the longest rivers
That teem with life in full abundance,
Nor stand in the softest rain
To cleanse the harshest of our sins…
We will never rake and clear our fields
Of foul and evil deeds,
Nor uproot every weed
From our poison-ivy past;
Nor hose away the blood
From the slaughter of our wars
Then plow away the deaths
That count the tally of our hate…
We will never end the barren spread
That maps famine in our fairness,
Nor end the drought of greed
That makes a dust bowl of our hopes;
Nor germinate the sprouts
To replant every stolen freedom,
Nor pick the ripest joy
From our most inclusive vines…
Until each and every women
Receives the acreage of her worth,
The lot of her humanity
With full possession of her claim;
Until each and every woman
Has the title to her being
And the deed to her distinction
With no fetters and no fears.
From the author: I was once told by my Arkansan, paternal grandfather, when I was six-years old, “You ain’t no kinda man ‘less you got some kinda land; a place to stand on and look to the Lord and say, this be mine.” I grew up thinking that the same must hold true for women. This is one of the main reasons why agricultural, geographical, and geological references and metaphors are common in my poems. And given that men believe they have a proprietary claim of ownership for the “land” that is the body of every woman, I wrote this poem with that analogy. Until was created in solidarity with Jane Does everywhere, from Ithaca to Israel and from New York to New Zealand. It contains 40 lines, a data point parallel to a statistic that, on average, there are 40 cases of sexual assault reported at Cornell University, every year.