Poor Lazarus Shale by Laura Da’

Some of the themes from my previous write-up of Five Songs for Lazarus Shale provide a helpful backdrop to this post.

from Tributaries

Live long enough
and salt pork, beans,
yearling colts, honey and butter,
something will turn into a wedge
to bend your will.

Missionaries call for my sons to send off to school,
each season when the corn is green.
I tuck them into the rows
farthest to the north of my cabin.
Keep them busy with the threshing as I whisper
their true names into the ears we consume,
but I leave a path to them
like a snake
by slithering away through the sparse harvest.

Frost breaks under my mare’s hooves
when I ride to sign my name at the Neosho mission.
My sons and nephews
traded to industrial school in the north
for the release of seven barrels of winter rations.

This commerce—
makes me brother to dragons, companion to owls.

The themes of the corn as a reflection of the well-being of the people who cultivate it and the subject of names and naming continue into Poor Lazarus. This poem (like the previous one) is part of the second section of this book which is all about the period of removal.

The narrator in this poem is clearly conflicted between his desire to “tuck [his sons] away” while holding onto “their true names” whispering them “into the ears [of corn] we consume” and with the “wedge / to bend [his will]” that the “sparse harvest” increasingly creates. He compares himself to a snake, dragons, and owls in his decision to trade his sons and nephews “to the industrial school in the north / for the release of seven barrels of winter rations.”

I like the way that the poem uses the indention to specifically call attention to the narrator’s actions and feelings that move towards this trade vs. the purely descriptive language that is without indention.

The line about commerce also represents a significant typographically break from the form of the previous stanzas calling attention to the line and creatin a pivot point from which the rest of the poem moves onto the narrator’s mental state after making the trade:

Riding away from the mission,
I call to my sister’s youngest child,
the only one
still too young for school,
Come over here and ride with your old uncle.

The boy clambers up behind me,
bare toe notched into the girth for warmth and purchase.
My boots quiver along the sides of the horse’s flanks
as I endeavor to slip them into the stirrups
that frame the ground below in jerky patches.

Child, I keep repeating. Nephew.
The horse dances nervously,
sensing my frenzy.
To his credit,
the boy
keeps a steady hand on the reins.

The “jerky”, “[nervous]”, “frenzy” of the narrator’s relationship to his horse does an excellent job of conveying the mental anguish that he is suffering having traded away his children to the Indian School for rations, but I’m not entirely sure what to make of the strong image of the younger child and his stability.

I’m also not sure what to think of the title and who Lazarus is supposed to be in this poem (the narrator? one of the children sent to the Indian School? or the boy who is too young to go?), but I like the ambiguity as it emphasizes the generational nature of this kind of trauma. One of the ways it’s probably passed down is in situations like the one described in the end of this poem where a child too young to go to school is faced with the task of stabilizing and supporting his elders rather than the other way around (perhaps part of the reason for that final image?).